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THE UNITED STATES 



I 



THE UNITED STATES 



ITS HISTORY AND CONSTITUTION 



BY 



ALEXANDER JOHNSTON 

Late Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Economy 
IN Princeton College 




NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1889 



£.1 



COPTRIGHT, 1888, 

By ALEXANDER JOHNSTON. 



Copyright, 1889, 
By CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 



;^\^ 



TVPOGRAPHY BY J. S. GUSHING AND CO. 

PRESSVVORK BY BERWICK AND SMITH. 

BOSTON. 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 



The contents of the present volume, by the late Pro- 
fessor Alexander Johnston, first appeared as the article 
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the history and Con- 
stitution of the United States. The narrative, it should 
be borne in mind, ends with the year 1887 — the last of 
the period entitled by the author "The Keconstructed 
Nation: 1865-1887." There are, however, few details 
which the events of the past two years have modified, 
and few which need to be supplemented. Some slight 
verbal changes, where evidently indicated, have been 
made in this sense, a note added with reference to the 
admission into the Union of Washington, Montana, and 
North and South Dakota, and the election of Harrison 
and Morton, and the prohibition of Chinese immigration 
chronicled. It has not been thought advisable, however, 
to change or supplement the text in two or three other 
instances in which statistics of 1889 might have been 
given, but in which the reader will perceive those of 
1887 to have been retained as better preserving the con- 
sistency and significance of the passages in which they 
occur. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Colonization 1 

II. The Struggle for Expansion . . . .23 

III. The Struggle for Union 33 

IV. The Struggle for Independence ... 60 
V. The Struggle for National Government . 79 

VI. The Development of Democracy . . . 120 
VII. Democracy and Nationality .... 139 
VIII. Industrial Development and Sectional Di- 
vergence 166 

IX. Tendencies to Disunion 191 

X. The Civil War 214 

XI. The Reconstructed Nation .... 245 

Bibliography 273 

Presidents and Vice-Presidents . . . 277 

Index 279 



THE UI^ITED STATES, 



COLONIZATION. 

1607-1750. 



1. Though the voyages of the Cabots (1497-98) along 
the coast of North America were the ground which the 
English finally adopted as a basis for their claims on 
that continent, no very effective steps were taken to 
reduce the continent to possession until after 1606. 
Martin Frobisher (1576) failed in an attempt ^ , 

^ ''^ -*■ Early voyages 

to explore Labrador. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and 
(1578) failed in a similar attempt on the con- ^^p'°^^^'°"^- 
tinent; and in a second effort (1583) he was lost in a 
storm at sea on his return. In 1584 his half-brother 
Ealeigh took up the work under commission from Queen 
Elizabeth. He sent two small vessels under Amidas 
and Barlow. They explored the south-central coast of 
what is now the United States, and returned with such 
flattering reports that the courtly Raleigh at once named 
the country Virginia, in honor of the queen, and sent 
out a colony. It was starved out in a year (1585). He 
sent another to the same place, Roanoke Island (1587), 



THE UNITED STATES. 



but it had disappeared when it Avas searched for three 
years after. Gosnold (1602) found a shorter route across 
the Atlantic, and spent a winter on an island off the 
present coast of Massachusetts ; but his men refused to 
stay longer. These are the official records of English 
explorations up to 1606; but it is pretty certain that 
fishing and trading voyages, of which no record was kept, 
were more common than has been supposed, and that 
they kept alive a knowledge of the country. 

2. In 1606 James I. formed two companies by a single 

charter. To one, the London Company, he granted the 

. , iSTorth- American coast between 34° and 38° 

London 

and Plymouth N. lat. ; to the othcr, the Plymouth Com- 
companies. ^^^ij, whosc membership was more in the 
west of England, he granted the coast between 41° and 
45° N. lat. The intervening coast, between lat. 38° and 
41°, or between the Eappahannock and Hudson rivers, 
was to be common to both, but neither was to plant a 
settlement within 100 miles of a previous settlement of 
the other. Each was to be governed by a council ap- 
pointed by the king, and these councils were to appoint 
colonial councils of thirteen, with really absolute powers. 
Neither company did much in colonization : the London 
Company gave up its charter in 1624, and the Plymouth 
Comj^any, after a complete change of constitution in 
1620, surrendered its charter in 1635. But the London 
Company at least began the work of colonization, and the 
Plymouth Company parcelled out its grant to actual colo- 
nists. Above all, the charter of the two companies had 
granted the principle to which the colonists always 
appealed as the foundation of English colonization in 
North America, as the condition on which immigrants 
had entered it, irrevocable unless by mutual consent of 



COLONIZATION. 



crown and subjects : "Also, we do, for us, our heirs and 
successors, declare by these presents that all and every 
the persons, being our subjects, which shall go and in- 
habit within the said colony and plantation, and every 
their children and posterity, which shall happen to be 
born within any of the limits thereof, shall have and 
enjoy all liberties, franchises, and immunities of free 
denizens and natural subjects within any of our other 
dominions, to all intents and purposes as if they had 
been abiding and born within this our realm of England, 
or in any other of our dominions." 

3. The London Company was first in the field. A ship- 
load of the adventurers then swarming in London was 
sent out under Christopher Newport. He found a fine 
river, which he named after the king, and on its banks, 
within the present State of Virginia, he settlement of 
planted the settlement of Jamestown^ (13th Jamestown; 
May, 1607). Misgovernment, dissension, mismanage- 
ment, and starvation were almost too much for the 
infant colony, and several times the colonists were on 
the point of giving it up and going home. Twelve 
years were required to put Virginia on a f yi i i • 
sound footing. By that time the liberal 
element in the London Company had got control of it, 
and granted the colonists a representative government. 

1 The former settlement of Jamestown is now in James City county, 
Va., about 32 miles from the mouth of the James river. It was at first 
the capital of the colony, but began to decline when Williamsburgh 
was made the capital. Its death-blow was received when it was burned 
in 1676, during Bacon's rebellion. It was not rebuilt, and has now 
almost disappeared. " Nothing remains but the ruins of a church tower 
covered with ivy, and some old tombstones. The river encroaches year 
by year, and the ground occupied by the original huts is already sub- 
merged." 



THE UNITED STATES. 



The year in which this house of burgesses met (1619) 
was the year in which African slaves were introduced 
into the colony from a Dutch vessel. 

4. Separatists from the Church of England began the 
more northerly settlements. Driven from England, they 
found refuge in Holland. Thence returning for the 
moment to England, a company of 102 of them set sail 
for America in the ^^ Mayflower," landing (December 21, 

Settlement of 1620) at Plymouth, in the south-eastern part 
Plymouth ; ^f ^he prcscut State of Massachusetts. The 
rigors of a new and cold country, combined with poverty 
and the payment of interest at 45 per cent., made the 
early years of the Plymouth colony a desperate struggle 
for existence, but it survived. It had no special charter, 
but a license from the Plymouth Company. Other little 
towns were founded to the north of this settlement, and 
in 1629 these were all embraced in a charter given by 
of Massachu- Charlcs I. to the Governor and Company of 
setts Bay ; Massachusctts Bay. This was a Puritan ven- 
ture, composed of men of higher social grade than the 
Plymouth Separatists, and was meant to furnish a refuge 
for those who dreaded the ecclesiastical policy of the 
crown. The next year the company took the bold step 
of transferring its organization to America, so as to be 
out of the immediate notice of the crown and its agents. 
Eleven vessels took more than a thousand colonists over, 
and the real colony of Massachusetts was begun. 

5. The charter of the London Company was surren- 
dered to the crown, as has been said, in 1624 ; and the 
king thereafter disposed of the territory which had been 

^ranted to it as he pleased. In 1632 the new 

of Maryland ;°, o ^,- ^ ■: -. ^ ■ n 

colony 01 Maryland was carved out oi it for 
Lord Baltimore. In 1663 the territory to the south of 



COLONIZATION. 5 



the present State of Virginia was cut off from it and 
called Carolina, covering the present States of settlement of 
North and South Carolina and Georgia. In Carolina ; 
1729 Carolina was divided into North and South Caro- 
lina: and in 1732 the last of the colonies, 

^ • • T -r-1' T • T °^ Georgia ; 

Georgia, was organized. Five distinct colo- 
nies were thus formed out of the original London Com- 
pany's grant. 

6. When the Plymouth Company finally surrendered 
its charter in 1635, it had made one ineffectual attempt 
at colonization (1607) near the mouth of the Kennebec 
river, in Maine, and one complete colony, Massachusetts 
Bay, had arisen within its territory. Another colony, 
that of Plymouth, existed by license. Massachusetts set- 
tlers, without even a license, were pouring into the vacant 
territory to the south of Massachusetts, there to form the 
colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island, , . ^. ^ 

' of Connecticut 

afterwards chartered by the crown, 1662 and and 

1663. A few fishing villages to the north of ''^°''' ''''"^• 
Massachusetts, established under the grant of John 
Mason, were the nucleus of the colony of of New Hamp- 
New Hampshire. The present States of Ver- ^^'^^• 
mont and Maine were not yet organized. Out of the 
original Plymouth Company's grant were thus formed 
the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Hhode Island, 
and New Hampshire. The name New England was 
commonly applied to the whole territory from the begin- 
ning, having been first used by Captain John Smith in 
1614. 

7. Nine of the "old thirteen" colonies are thus ac- 
counted for. The remaining four fell in the territory 
between the two main grants, which was to be common to 
both companies, but was in fact never appropriated by 



THE UNITED STATES. 



either. The Spaniard had settled contentedly far to the 
south ; and the Frenchman, still bound by too many of 
the ancient ecclesiastical influences to contest supremacy 
with the Spaniard, had settled as far to the north as pos- 
sible, in Canada. England had been so far released from 
ecclesiastical influences by the spread of the Reformation 
as to be prepared to contest supremacy with Spaniard, 
Frenchman, or any one else ; but her lingering desires to 
avoid open conflict at any cheap rate had tended to fix 
her settlements on the very choicest part of the coast, in 
the middle latitudes, — a fact which was to color the 
whole future history of the continent. The concurrent 
claims of the two English companies in the central zone 
seem to have deterred both of them from any attempt to 
interfere with the development of a colony there by the 
only other people of western Europe which was prepared 
The Dutch to grasp at such an opportunity. The Dutch 
settlements. (^1609) scut out Hcury Hudsou, an English- 
man in their service, and he made the first close explora- 
tion of this central region. Dutch merchants thereupon 
set up a trading post at Manhadoes (the present city of 
New York), where a government under the Dutch West 
India Company was organized in 1621, when the Dutch 
states-general had granted the territory to it. The terri- 
tory was named New Netherland, and the town at the 
mouth of the Hudson river New Amsterdam. Sweden 
sent a colony to Delaware bay in 1638 ; but the attempt 
was never thoroughly backed, and in 1655 it was surren- 
dered to the Dutch. 

8. By the time of the Restoration in England, the 
northern and southern English colonies had developed so 
far that the existence of this alien element between them 
had come to be a recognized annoyance and danger. From 



COLONIZATION. 



the Hudson river to Maine, from the Savannah river to 
Delaware Bay, all was English. Roads had been roughly 
marked out ; ships were sailing along the respective coasts 
as if at home ; colonial govermnents were beginning to lean 
upon one another for support ; but between the two was 
a territory which might at any moment turn to hostility. 
There was an evidently growing disposition in New 
England to attempt the conquest of it unaided. When 
England and Holland found themselves at war (1664), 
the opportunity arrived for a blow at Holland's colonial 
possessions. An English army and fleet under Colonel 
Nichols touched at Boston, and, proceeding thence to New 
Amsterdam, took possession of the whole central terri- 
tory. It had been granted by the king to his brother, 
the duke of York, and the province and city were now 
named New York in honor of the new pro- The colony of 
prietor. The duke, the same year, granted a New York; 
part of his territory to Berkeley and Carteret, and the 
new colony of New Jersey was the result, of New Jersey ; 
In 1681 the great parallelogram west of New ^f Pennsyi- 
Jersey was granted to Penn and called Penn- ^^"'^^ 
sylvania. In the following year Penn bought from the 
duke of York the little piece of territory which remained 
united to Pennsylvania until the revolution, then be- 
coming the State of Delaware. The central 
territory thus furnished four of the " old 
thirteen " colonies. New England four, and the southern 
portion five. 

9. If there was any governing idea in the organization 
of the colonial governments, it was of the jhe colonial 
rudest kind ; and in fact each was allowed to go^emnnents. 
be so largely modified by circumstances that, with a 
general similarity, there was the widest possible diver- 



8 THE UNITED STATES. 

gence. A general division of the colonial governments 
The charter IS into charter, proprietary, and royal govern- 

coionies. mcnts. The charter governments were Mas- 
sachusetts, Connecticut, and Ehode Island. In these the 
colonial governments had charters from the crown, giving 
the people, or freemen, the right to choose their own 
governors and other magistrates, to make their own laws, 
and to interpret and enforce them. Only Connecticut 
and Ehode Island kept their charters intact. The Massa- 
chusetts charter was cancelled by the crown judges (1684) 
under a quo warranto; and in 1691 a new charter was 
granted. As it reserved to the crown the appointment of 
the governor, with an absolute veto on laws and after 
1726 on the election of the speaker of the lower house, 
Massachusetts was thus taken out of the class of purely 
charter colonies and put into that of a semi-royal colony. 
The proprietary colonies were New Hampshire, New 
The proprietary York, Ncw Jcrscy, Pennsylvania (including 

colonies. Dclawarc), Maryland, Carolina, and Georgia. 
These were granted to proprietors, who, as inducements 
to settlers, granted governmental privileges almost as 
liberal as those of the charter colonies. Only Penn- 
sylvania, Delaware, and Maryland remained proprietary 
colonies down to the revolution, and in these the gov- 
ernor had a charter right of veto on legislation. Vir- 

The royal ginia bccamc a royal colony in 1620, and 

colonies. ]s[g^ York as soon as its proprietor became 
king ; and other proprietors, becoming tired of continual 
quarrels with the colonists, gradually surrendered their 
grants to the crown. New Hampshire, New York, New 
Jersey, North and South Carolina, and Georgia had thus 
become royal colonies before the revolution. In the royal 
colonies, commonly called provinces, the governors were 



COLONIZATION. 9 



appointed by the crown, and had an absolute veto on 
legislation. There were thus at last three proprietary, 
seven royal, one semi-royal, and two charter colonies. 

10. The two charter colonies were simple Representative 
representative democracies, having the power systems. 
to legislate without even a practical appeal to the crown, 
and having no royal governor or agent within their bor- 
ders. Their systems were the high-water mark to which 
the desires and claims of the other colonies gradually 
approached. Massachusetts and the proprietary colonies 
were very nearly on a level with them ; and the royal or 
proprietary governor's veto power was rather an annoy- 
ance than a fundamental difference. But in all the 
colonies representative governments had forced their 
way, and had very early taken a bicameral shape. In 
the charter colonies and Massachusetts the lower house 
was chosen by the towns and the upper house from the 
people at large, and the two houses made up the "as- 
sembly." In Pennsylvania and Delaware there was but 
one house. In the royal colonies and in Maryland the 
lower house alone was elected by the people ; the upper 
house, or council, was chosen by the crown through the 
governor ; and the assent of all three elements was essen- 
tial to legislation. In the final revolution the charter 
colonies did not change their governments at all ; they 
already had what they wanted. The revolution was con- 
summated in the other colonies by the assumption of 
power by the lower or popular house, usually known as the 
"assembly," the governor or council, or both, being ousted. 

11. All these governmental organizations Town 
take a prominent place in American history, ^"^ p^^'^^- 
and had a strong influence on the ultimate development 
of the United States ; and yet they touched the life of 



10 THE UNITED STATES. 

the people at comparatively few points. A more marked 
and important distinction is in the local organizations 
of the northern and southern colonies. All the southern 
colonies began as proprietary governments. Settlers 
went there as individuals connected only with the 
colony. To the individual the colony was the great 
political factor ; his only other connection was with his 
parish, to which the colony allowed few political func- 
tions; and, where political power touched him at all, it 
was through the colony. In time it became necessary to 
allow political powers to the parish or county, but they 
were really more judicial than political. "The southern 
county was a modified English shire, with the towns left 
out." The whole tendency shows the character of the 
immigration in this part of the country, from English 
districts outside of the influence of the towns. 

12. In New England local organization was quite dif- 
ferent. A good example is the town of Dorchester. 
The Organized (March 20, 1630) in Plymouth, 
town system. England, whcu its people were on the point 
of embarkation for America, it took the shape of a dis- 
tinct town and church before they went on shipboard. 
Its civil and ecclesiastical organizations were complete 
before they landed in Massachusetts Bay and came 
under the jurisdiction of a chartered company. Its 
people governed themselves, in their town government, 
in all but a few points, in which the colony asserted 
superiority. As the colony's claims increased, the town's 
dissatisfaction increased. In 1635 the town migrated in 
a body, with its civil and ecclesiastical organization still 
intact, into the vacant territory of Connecticut, and there 
became the town of Windsor. Here, uniting with other 
towns, which had migrated in a similar fashion, it formed 



COLONIZATION. 11 



the new Commonwealth, of Connecticut, in which the 
local liberty of the towns was fully secured in the frame 
of government. Rhode Island was formed in the same 
way, by separate towns ; Vermont afterwards in the 
same way ; and the towns of the parent colony of Mas- 
sachusetts learned to claim a larger liberty than had 
been possible at first. Thus, all through New England, 
the local town organizations came to monopolize almost 
all ordinary governmental powers ; and the counties to 
which the towns belonged were judicial, not political, 
units, marking merely the jurisdiction of the sheriff. In 
the annual town meetings, and in special meetings from 
time to time, the freemen exercised, without any formal 
grant, the powers of self-taxation, of expenditure of 
taxation, of trial by jury, and of a complete local gov- 
ernment. Further, the lower houses of their colonial 
legislatures were made up of generally equal represen- 
tations from the towns, while the upper houses were 
chosen from the colony at large. In this was the germ 
of the subsequent development of the United States 
senate, in which the States are equally represented, and 
of the house of representatives, representing the people 
numerically (§§ 104, 105, 109, 110). 

13. The two opposite systems of the north and south 
found a field for conflict in the organization of the cen- 
tral territory after its acquisition (§ 8). The jhe middle 
crown agents were strongly disposed to follow colonies. 
the more centralized system of the southern colonies, 
though Penn, having organized counties and restricted 
his legislature to a single house, based it on the counties. 
In New York and New Jersey the Dutch system of 
" patroonships " had left a simulacrum of local indepen- 
dence, and a stronger tendency in the same direction 



12 THE UNITED STATES. 

came in through immigration from New England. To 
encourage this immigration, the New Jersey proprietors 
gave town powers to many of them ; and some of the 
New Jersey towns were merely transplanted New Eng- 
land towns. But the middle colonies never arrived at 
any distinct system ; at the best, their system was a 
conglomerate. Much the same result has been reached 
in the new Western States, organized under the care of 
the Federal G-overnment, where the New England immi- 
gration has brought with it a demand for local self- 
government which has resulted in a compromise between 
the two systems of town units and county units. 

14. Ecclesiastical divisions were at first as strong as 
civil diversities. The New England colonies were Con- 
Ecciesiasticai grcgatioual, aud these churches were estab- 
systems. Hshcd and supported by law, except in Ehode 
Island, where the Baptists were numerically superior. 
In the royal colonies generally there was a steady dispo- 
sition to establish the Church of England, and it was 
more or less successful. In language there were striking 
dissimilarities, due to a most heterogeneous immigration. 
It was said that every language of Europe could be 
found in the colony of Pennsylvania. But, after all, 
this diversity had no indications of persistence ; the im- 
migration in each case had been too small to 
support itself. Very little of the wonderful 
increase of American population between 1607 and 1750 
was due to immigration ; most of it had come from natu- 
ral increase. After the first outflow from Old to New 
England, in 1630-31, emigration was checked at first by 
the changing circumstances of the struggle between the 
people and the king, and, when the struggle was over, 
by the better-known difficulties of life in the colonies. 



COLONIZATION. 13 



Franklin, in 1751, when he estimated that there were 
" near a million English souls " in the colonies, thought 
that scarce eighty thousand had been brought over by 
sea. No matter how diverse the small immigration 
might have been on its arrival, there was a steady pres- 
sure on its descendants to turn them into Englishmen ; 
and it was very successful. When Whitefield, the revival- 
ist, visited America about 1740, he found the population 
sufficiently homogeneous for his preaching to take effect, 
all the way from Georgia to New England. The same 
tendency shows itself in the complete freedom of inter- 
colonial migration. Men went from one colony to an- 
other, or held estates, or took inheritances in different 
colonies, without the slightest notion that they were 
under any essentially diverse political conditions. The 
whole coast, from Nova Scotia to the Spanish possessions 
in Florida, Avas one in all essential circumstances ; and 
there was only the need of some sudden shock to crys- 
tallize it into a real political unity. Hardly anything in 
history is more impressive than this mustering of Eng- 
lishmen on the Atlantic coast of North America, their 
organization of natural and simple governments, and 
their preparations for the final march of 3000 miles west- 
ward, unless it be the utter ignorance of the home Gov- 
ernment and people that any such process was going on. 
15. This ignorance had one singular effect in com- 
pleting the difference between the new and the 
old country. An odd belief that European 
plants and animals degenerated in size and quality on 
transplantation to the western continent was persistent 
at the time even among learned men in Europe, and 
Jefferson felt bound to take great pains to combat it so 
late as the end of the 18th century. That passage in 



14 THE UNITED STATES. 

Thackeray's Virginians, where the head of the elder 
Virginian branch of the family returns to England, to be 
treated with contempt and indifference by the younger 
branch which had remained at home, indicates the state 
of mind among the influential classes in England which 
bent them against any admission of Americans to the 
honors or privileges of the English higher classes. A 
few titles were given; entails were maintained in the 
southern colonies ; but there were no such systematic 
efforts as are necessary to maintain an aristocratic class. 
This may have been gratifying to the ruling class in 
England ; but it was in reality an unconsciously syste- 
matic effort to develop democracy in the English colonies 
in North America. In combination with the free repre- 
sentative institutions which had taken root there, it was 
very successful, and, when the final struggle between the 
English ruling class and the colonists took shape, the 
former had singularly few friends or allies in the colonies. 
What the results might have been if efforts had been 
made to build up a titled class in the colonies, with 
entailed revenues and hereditary privileges in the upper 
houses of the colonial legislatures, is not easy to imagine ; 
but the prejudices of the privileged classes at home 
eliminated this factor from the problem. Every influence 
conduced to make the American commonwealths repre- 
sentative democracies ; and the reservation of crown in- 
fluence in the functions of the governors or the appoint- 
ment of the council was merely a dam which was sure 
to be broken down as development increased. 

16. Social circumstances had all the features of life in 
Social a new country, aggravated by the difficulties 

conditions. Qf inter-communication at that time. In the 
southern and middle colonies there was a rude abundance, 



COLONIZATION. 15 



..so that, however much the want of luxuries might be felt, 
there was no lack of the necessaries of life. The growth 
of tobacco, indigo, and rice in the southern colonies was 
so large a source of wealth that luxury in that part of 
the country had taken a more pronounced form than in 
the others. The southern planter, trained in English 
schools and universities and admitted to the English bar, 
was more like an English gentleman in a condition of 
temporary retirement than an American colonist. The 
settler of the middle colonies was the ordinary agricul- 
turist. The hardships of colonial life were the special 
lot of the New England colonist. For some reason — 
perhaps because the forests retained the snow on the 
ground — the New England winters were more severe 
than they are now. The rudely built house, with its 
enormous chimney attracting draughts of outer air from 
every point, was a poor protection against the cold. 
Travel, difficult enough at the best, became impossible in 
winter, unless the snow rose so high as to blot out the 
roads and permit the traveller to drive his sledge across 
country. Medical and surgical attendance was scarce in 
summer, and hardly dreamed of in winter. The religious 
feeling of the people was against amusements of all 
kinds, except going to funerals, an occasional dinner, and 
the restricted enjoyments of courtship. It was a point 
of honor or of religious feeling to exclude luxury from 
church equipment : stoves were not known in Connecticut 
churches until the beginning of this century, and yet 
new-born infants were taken to church for baptism in the 
bitterest weather.^ 



1 An extract from a New England diary of 1716 will give some notion 
of social circumstances at that comparatively late period. " Lord's 



16 THE UNITED STATES. 

17. Wealth in tlie southern colonies was sufficient to 
give the better classes there an education of a very high 
order ; and they in turn, by virtue of their polit- 
ical and social leadership, imparted something 
of their acquisitions to those below them. In the middle 
colonies commercial pursuits and those interests which 
go to make men of affairs had something of the same in- 
fluence on special classes. In New England education was 
more general, even though it had no such advantages for 
special classes as at the south. The first immigration 
into New England contained an unusually large propor- 
tion of English university men, particularly among the 
ministers. These fixed the mould into which their de- 
scendants have been run, and New England's influence 
in the United States has been due largely to them. The 
town system added to their influence. Owing to it the 
ebbing and flowing of population through New England 
was not blind or unorganized. Every little town was a 
skeleton battalion, to be filled up by subsequent increase 
and immigration ; and the ministers and other profes- 
sional men made a multitude of successors for themselves, 
with all their own ideas. Considering the execrable 
quality of school and college instruction in New England, 
as elsewhere at the time, it is very remarkable that, as 
the original sui3ply of university-bred leaders died off, 
there was a full crop of American-bred men quite pre- 
pared to take their places and carry on their work. Here 

Day, Jany. 15. An extraordinary cold Storm of wind and Snow. Blows 
much as coming home at Noon and so holds on. Bread was frozen at 
the Lord's table; Mr. Pemberton administered. Came not out to after- 
noon exercise. Though 'twas so cold, yet John Tuckerman was bap- 
tised. At six a-clock my ink freezes so that I can hardly write by a 
good fire in my wire's chamber. Yet was very comfortable at meeting. 
Laus Deo." 



COL ONIZA TION. 17 



were Harvard and Yale, the two leading colleges of the 
country, which in 1760 had six : — Harvard College, in 
Massachusetts (founded in 1636) ; William and Mary 
College, in Virginia (1692) ; Yale College, in Connecticut 
(1700) ; Princeton College, in New Jersey (1746) ; Penn- 
sylvania University (1749) ; and King's, now Columbia, 
College, in New York (1754). 

18. Shipwrights had been sent to Virginia at an early 
date ; but shipbuilding never made great head in the 
southern colonies, in spite of the fact that 

. Commerce. 

they had all the materials for it in abundance. 
At a later period ships were built, and it was not uncom- 
mon for planters to have their private docks on their 
own plantations, where their ships were freighted for 
Europe. But such building was individual : each planter 
built only for himself. The first vessel built by Euro- 
peans in this part of the continent was constructed by 
Adrian Block at New Amsterdam (1614). Many small 
vessels were built at the mouth of the Hudson river 
under Dutch and English domination, but New York's 
commercial supremacy did not fairly begin until after the 
revolution. Perhaps the hardships of life in New Eng- 
land made its people prefer water to land ; at any rate 
they took to shipbuilding early and carried it on dili- 
gently and successfully. Plymouth built a little vessel 
before the settlement was five years old, and Massachu- 
setts another, the "Blessing of the Bay" (1631). Be- 
fore 1650 New England vessels had begun the general 
foreign trade, from port to port, which combined exporta- 
tion with a foreign coasting trade and mercantile business, 
the form in which New England commercial enterprise 
was to show itself most strongly. Before 1724 English 
ship-carpenters complained of the competition of the 



18 THE UNITED STATES. 

Americans, and in 1760 the colonies were building new 
ships at the rate of about 20,000 tons a year, most of 
them being sold in England. 

19. The earliest manufactures in the colonies were 
naturally those of the simplest kind, the products of saw- 

^' Manufactures Hiills, grist-mills, and tanneries, and home- 
and mining, madc cloth. Thc scarch for orcs, howcvcr, had 
been a prime cause of immigration with many of the 
settlers, and they turned almost at once to mining and 
metallurgy. Most of their efforts failed, in spite of 
'' premiums," bounties, and monopolies for terms of years 
granted by the colonial legislatures. To this the produc- 
tion of iron was an exception. It was produced, from 
the beginning of the 18th century, in western Massachu- 
setts and Connecticut, in eastern New York, in northern 
New Jersey, and in eastern Pennsylvania. All these 
districts were about on a level, until the adaptation of 
the furnaces to the use of anthracite coal drove the New 
England and New York districts, which had depended 
on wood as fuel, almost out of competition (§ 210). Until 
that time iron production was a leading New England 
industry. Not only were the various products of iron 
exported largely ; the manufacture of nails, and of other 
articles which could be made by an industrious agricul- 
tural population in winter and stormy weather, was a 
" home industry " on which New Englanders depended 
for much of their support. 

20. The colonial system of England differed in no 
respect from that of other European nations of the time ; 

The English probably none of them could have conceived 
colonial system, ^j^y otlicr as possiblc. The colonies were to 
be depots for the distribution of home products on 
a new soil; whenever they assumed any other func- 



COL ONIZA TION. 19 



tions they were to be checked. The attempts of the 
Americans to engage in commerce with other nations, 
their shipbuilding, and their growing manufactures were, 
in appearance, deductions from the general market of 
English producers, and the home Government felt itself 
bound to interfere. Virginia claimed, by charter- right, 
the power to trade freely with foreign nations ; and 
Virginia was notoriously on the side of the Stuarts 
against the parliament. In 1651 parliament passed the 
Navigation Act, forbidding the carrying of The Naviga- 
colonial produce to England unless in English ^'°" '-^'^^• 
or colonial vessels, with an English captain and crew. 
By the Act of 1661 the reach of the system was extended. 
Sugar, tobacco, indigo, and other ''enumerated articles," 
grown or manufactured in the colonies, were not to be 
shipped to any country but England. All that was neces- 
sary to make this part of the work complete was to add 
to the "enumerated articles," from time to time, any 
which should become important colonial products. The 
cap-stone was placed on the system in 1663, when the 
exportation of Euro^^ean products to the colonies was 
forbidden, unless in vessels owned and loaded as in the 
preceding Acts and loaded in England. Virginia's com- 
merce withered at once under the enforcement of the 
system. New England, allowed to evade the system by 
Cromwell for political reasons, continued to evade it 
thereafter by smuggling and bold seamanship. 

21. In 1699, on complaint of English manufacturers 
that the colonists were cutting them out of their foreign 
wool markets, parliament enacted that no wool Restrictive 
or woollen manufactures should be shipped ^^'^^• 
from any of the colonies, under penalty of forfeiture of 
ship and cargo. This was the first fruits of the appoint- 



20 THE UNITED STATES. 

ment of the Board of Trade and Plantations three years 
before. From this time until the revolution, this body was 
never idle ; but, as its work was almost confined to schemes 
for checking or destroying the trade and manufactures of 
the plantations, it cannot be said to have done them any 
great service. It was continually spurring on colonial 
governors to turn their people to the production of naval 
stores, or to any occupation which would divert them 
from manufactures ; and the governors, between fear of 
the legislatures which paid their salaries and of the 
Board which was watching them narrowly, had evidently 
no easy position. At intervals the Board heard the com- 
plaints of English manufacturers, and framed remedial 
bills for parliament. From 1718 the manufacture of iron 
was considered particularly obnoxious ; and, so late as 
1766, Pitt himself asserted the right and duty of parlia- 
ment to "bind the trade and confine the manufactures'' 
of the colonies, and to do all but tax them without repre- 
sentation. In 1719 parliament passed its first prohibi- 
tion of iron manufactures in the colonies ; and in 1750 
it forbade under penalties the maintaining of iron-mills, 
slitting or rolling mills, plating-forges, and steel-furnaces 
in the colonies. At the same time, but as a favor to 
English manufacturers, it allowed the importation of 
American bar-iron into England, as it was cheaper and 
better than the Swedish. Before this, in 1731, parlia- 
ment had forbidden the manufacture or exportation of 
hats in or from the colonies, and even their transporta- 
tion from one colony to another. All these Acts, and 
others of a kindred nature, were persistently evaded or 
defied ; but the constant training in this direction was 
not a good one for the maintenance of the connection 
between the colonies and the mother country, after the 



COL ONIZA TION. 21 



interested classes in the colonies should become numerous 
and their interests large. Unluckily for the connection, 
the arrival at this point was just the time when the 
attempt was first made to enforce the Acts with vigor 
(§ 38). 

22. English imports from the North American colonies 
amounted to £395,000 in 1700, £574,000 in 1730, and 
£761,000 in 1760 ; the exports to the colonies jhe American 
in the same years were £344,000, £537,000, "'^'^^^' 
and £2,612,000. In spite of parliamentary exactions 
and interferences, a great and entirely new market 
had been opened to English trade. The difference 
between the year 1606, when there was not an English 
settler on the North- American continent, and 1760, when 
there were a million and a half with a great and growing 
commerce, is remarkable. It is still more remarkable 
when one considers that this population was already 
nearly one-fourth of that of England and Wales. Its 
growth, however, steadily increased the difficulties of 
maintaining the English system of control, which con- 
sisted mainly in the interference of the governors with 
legislation proposed by the assemblies. As the numbers 
and material interests of the subjects increased, the 
necessities for governmental interference increased with 
them, and yet the power of the subjects to coerce the 
governors increased as well. Only time was needed to 
bring the divergence to a point where change of policy 
must have disruption as its only alternative. 

23. Merely material prosperity, the development of 
wealth and comfort, was very far from the whole work 
of the colonies. In spite of attempts in Religious 
almost every colony to establish some form freedom. 

of religious belief on a government foundation, religious 



22 THE UNITED STATES. 

freedom had really come to prevail to an extent very 
uncommon elsewhere at the time. Even in New Eng- 
land, where the theory of the state as an isolated oppor- 
tunity for the practice of a particular form of worship 
had been held most strongly, persecution was directed 
chiefly against the Quakers, and that mainly on semi- 
political grounds, because of their determination to annoy 
congregations in their worship or to outrage some feeling 
of propriety. As soon as it came to be realized that the 
easiest method to deprive them of the power of annoy- 
ance was to ignore them, that method was adopted; 
indeed, two of the New England colonies took hardly 
any other method from the beginning. 

24. In political work the colonies had been very suc- 
cessful. They had built up thirteen distinct political 
Political units, representative democracies so simple 
freedom. ^iTid natural in their political structure that 
time has hardly changed the essential nature of the 
American State governments. In so doing, the Ameri- 
cans were really laying the foundations of the future 
national structure, for there is hardly a successful fea- 
ture in the present national government which was not 
derived or directly copied from the original colonial 
growths ; while the absolutely new features, such as the 
electoral system (§ 119), introduced into the national 
system by way of experiment, have almost as generally 
proved failures, and have been diverted from their origi- 
nal purposes or have become obsolete. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXPANSION. 23 

II. 

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXPANSION. 

1750-63. 

25. The English settlements along the Atlantic had 
covered the narrow strip of coast territory quite thor- 
oughly before it was possible to think of expansion west- 
ward. Since about 1605 Canada had been undisputedly 
in the hands of the French. Their traders ^^ ^ ^ 

The French 

and missionaries had entered the present in Canada 
western United States ; Marquette and Joliet 
(1673) and La Salle (1682) had explored the upper 
Mississippi river, and others, following their track, had 
explored most of the Mississippi valley and had built 
forts in various parts of it. About 1700 the French 
opened ground at the mouth of the Mississippi : D'lber- 
ville (1702) founded Mobile and the French Mississippi 
Company (1718) founded the city of New Orleans. Con- 
sistent design, foiled at last only by failure of material, 
marks the proceedings of the French commanders in 
America for the next thirty years. New Orleans and 
Quebec were the extremities of a line of well-placed forts 
which were to secure the whole Mississippi valley, and 
to confine the English settlements forever to the strip of 
land along the coast bounded on the west by the Ap- 
palachian or Alleghany range of mountains, which is 
parallel to the coast and has but one important break in 
its barrier, the opening through which the Hudson river 
flows. The practical genius of the French plans is shown 



24 THE UNITED STATES. 

by the fact that so many of these old forts have since 
become the sites of great and flourishing western cities : 
Natchez, Vincennes, Peoria, Fort Wayne, Toledo, Detroit, 
Ogdensburgh, and Montreal either are built on or are 
so near to the old forts as to testify to the skill and 
foresight against which the English colonies had to con- 
tend. To this whole territory, extending from the mouth 
of the Mississippi to that of the St. Lawrence, covering 
even the western part of the present State of New York, 
the name of New France was given. The English pos- 
sessions, extending in hardly any place more than a 
hundred miles from the ocean, except where the Dutch 
had long ago planted the outpost of Fort Orange, or 
Albany, on the upper Hudson, were generally restricted 
to the immediate neighborhood of the coast, to which 
the early population had naturally clung as its base of 
supplies. 

26. The French difficulties were even greater than 
those of the English. The French people had never had 

,., , that love of emia^ration which had given the 

Weakness ° ^ 

of the English colonies their first great impetus. 
French system. -^^^^ ^j^^^^ ^j^^ Frcuch scttlcd they showcd 

more of a disposition to coalesce with the native popula- 
tion than to form a homogeneous people. The French 
were commonly far stronger with the Indians than were 
the English ; but at the end of a hundred and fifty years, 
when the English colonists numbered a million and a 
quarter, all animated by the same political purposes, the 
population of all New France was only about 100,000, 
and it is doubtful whether there were 7500 in the whole 
Mississippi valley. The whole French system, wisely as 
it was designed, was subject to constant and fatal inter- 
ference from a corrupt court. Its own organization was 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXPANSION. 25 

hampered by attempts to introduce the feudal features 
of home social life. A way was thus opened to exactions 
from every agent of the court, to which the people sub- 
mitted with hereditary patience, but which were fatal to 
all healthy development. Perhaps worst of all was the 
natural and inevitable formation of the French line of 
claims. Trending westward from Quebec to meet the 
northward line of forts from New Orleans, it was bent at 
the junction of the two parts, about Detroit, and its most 
important part lay right athwart the path of advancing 
English migration. The English wave was thus to strike 
the weaker French line in flank and at its weakest point, 
so that the final issue could not in any event have been 
doubtful. The French and Indian war probably only 
hastened the result. 

27. There had been wars between the French and the 
English colonies since the accession of William and Mary, 
mostly accessory to wars between the mother inter-coioniai 
countries. The colonies had taken part in the '^^'=- 
wars ended by the peace of Ryswick (1697), the peace 
of Utrecht (1713), and the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle 
(1748). The alliance of the French and Indians made 
all these struggles wretched experiences for the English. 
The province of Canada became a prison-pen, where cap- 
tives were held to ransom or adopted into savage tribes. 
Outlying settlements were broken up, or forced to expend 
a large part of their energy in watchful self-defence ; and 
it required all the persistence of the English colonies to 
continue their steady forward movement. Nevertheless 
they even undertook offensive operations. They captured 
Port Eoyal in 1690, but it was given up to the French in 
1697. They captured it again in 1710, and this time it 
was kept, with most of Acadia, which was now to be 



26 THE UNITED STATES. 

known as Nova Scotia. In 1745 the colonies took the 
strongest French fortress, Louisburgh, on Cape Breton 
Island, with very little assistance from the home Gov- 
ernment. Their land expeditions against Montreal and 
Quebec were unsuccessful, the reason for failure being 
usually defective transport. 

28. In the treaties which closed these wars, the inter- 
ests of the colonies met with little consideration. The 

The most notable instance of this was the 12th 
" asiento." articlc of the treaty of Utrecht, by which an 
English company was secured the exclusive right to carry 
African slaves into American ports. Originally meant 
to obtain the Spanish trade in negroes, the company had 
influence enough to commit the crown to a steady support 
of the African slave-trade in its own colonies. Again 
and again the English legislatures in North America 
attempted to stop the slave-trade, and were prevented 
by the royal veto. This will serve to explain a passage 
in Jefferson's first draft of the American Declaration of 
Independence, as follows : — " He [the king] has waged 
cruel war against human nature itself. . . . Determined 
to keep open a market where men should be bought and 
sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing 
every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this 
execrable commerce." 

29. All parties seem to have felt that the peace of Aix- 
la-Chapelle was but a truce at the best ; and the French 
court seems to have come at last to some comprehension 
of its extensive opportunities and duties in North Amer- 
ica. With its tardy sympathy, its agents on the new 
continent began the erection of barriers against the great 
wave of English westward migration which was just 
appearing over the crest of the Alleghanies. It was too 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXPANSION'. 27 

late, however, for the English colonies were really able 
to sustain themselves against the French colonies and 
court together. Their surveyors (1747) had crossed the 
crests of the mountains, and had brought back appetiz- 
ing accounts of the quality of the lands which lay beyond. 
The Ohio Company (1749), formed partly of The Ohio Com- 
Virginian speculators and partly of English- P^^y- 
men, had obtained a grant of 500,000 acres of land in the 
western part of Pennsylvania (then supposed to be a part 
of Virginia), with a monopoly of the Indian trade. As 
the grant was completely on the western side of the 
Alleghanies, and was the first English intrusion into the ■ 
Ohio valley, it behooved the French to meet the step with 
prompt action. Their agents traversed the Ohio country, 
making treaties with the Indians and burying lead plates 
inscribed with the lilies of France and a statement of the 
French claims. The erection of the Ohio Company's first 
fort (1752) brought on the crisis. The main line of 
French forts was too far away to be any check upon it. 
The French leaders therefore began to push a branch 
line eastward into the disputed territory. Their first 
work (1753) was put up at Presque Isle (now Erie), 
about 100 miles north of the Ohio Company's fort. The 
citadel of the disputed territory had been begun on the 
spot where Pittsburgh now stands, where the Alleghany 
and Monongahela unite to form the Ohio river. Gover- 
nor Dinwiddle, of Virginia, had obtained the right to 
erect the fort by treaty with the Indians. From Presque 
Isle the French began running a line of forts south, 
through the present "oil district" of Pennsylvania, 
towards the headquarters of the English. 

30. Washington was then a land-surveyor, barely of 
age ; but he was the agent whom Dinwiddle selected to 



28 THE UNITED STATES. 

carry an ultimatum to the French at Presque Isle. After 
a perilous winter passage through the wilderness, he 
found that the French had no intention of evacuating 
their position, and returned. Virginia at once (January, 
1754) voted money and men to maintain the western 
claims of the colonies ; and Washington was sent with 
400 provincial troops to secure the half-built fort at the 
head of the Ohio. The French were also pushing for that 
place. They won in the race, drove away the English 
workmen, and finished Fort Du Quesne, named after their 
governor. Washington, compelled to stop and fortify his 
position, won the first skirmish of the war with the 
French advanced guard, but was forced to surrender on 
terms (July 4, 1754). The usual incidents of a general 
Indian warfare followed for the rest of the year. 

31. Both Governments began to ship regular troops to 
America, though there was no formal declaration of war 
The French and uutil 1756. The ycar 1755 was marked by 
Indian War. j^j^g surprlsc and defeat of Braddock, a gal- 
lant and opinionated British officer who commanded an 
expedition against Fort Du Quesne, by the complete 
conquest of Nova Scotia, and by the defeat of the 
French, under their principal officer, Dieskau, at Lake 
George, in New York, by a force of provincial troops 
under Sir William Johnson. In 1756 the greatest of 
French Canadian governors, Montcalm, arrived ; and the 
tide of war went steadily against the English. The offi- 
cers sent out by the home Government were incompetent, 
and they generally declined to draw on the colonists for 
advice. Montcalm found them an easy prey; and his 
lines were steadily maintained at the point where they 
had been when Washington surrendered at Fort Neces- 
sity. Pitt's entrance to the Newcastle ministry (June, 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXPANSION. 29 

1757) changed all this. For the first time the colonies 
found a man who showed a sympathy with them and a 
willingness to use them. Their legislatures were sum- 
moned into counsel as to the conduct of the war ; and 
their alacrity in response was an augury of a change in 
its fortune. Incompetent officers were weeded out, with 
little regard to family or court influence. The whole 
force of the colonies was gathered up, and in 1758 
was launched at the French. All western New York was 
cleared of the enemy at a blow ; Fort Du Quesne was 
taken and renamed Fort Pitt ; Louisburgh, which had 
been restored to France at Aix-la-Chapelle, was again 
taken ; and the only failure of the year was the dreadful 
butchery of the English in assaulting the walls of Ticon- 
deroga. Louisburgh made an excellent point of attack 
against Quebec, and Montcalm was forced to draw off 
nearly all his troops elsewhere for the defence of his 
principal post. The year 1759 was therefore begun by 
the capture of Ticonderoga and almost all the French 
posts within the present United States, and was crowned 
by Wolfe's capture of the towering walls of Quebec. In 
1760, while George II. lay dying, the conquest of Canada 
was completed, and the dream of a great French empire 
in North America disappeared forever. 

32. The war continued through the first three years 
of George III., and the colonies took part in the capture of 
Havana after Spain had entered the struggle 
as an ally of France. The peace of Paris, 
which put an end to the war, restored Havana to Spain, 
in exchange for Florida, which now became English. 
France retired from North America, giving to Spain all 
her claims west of the Mississippi and that small portion 
east of the Mississippi which surrounds New Orleans, 



30 THE UNITED STATES. 

and to England the remainder of the continent east of 
the Mississipjji. Spain retained for her territory the 
name of Louisiana, originally given by the French. The 
rest of the continent was now " the English colonies of 
North America." 

33. It is evident now that the French and Indian war 
was the prelude to the American revolution. It trained 
the officers and men for the final struggle. It released 
the colonies from the pressure of the French in Canada 
so suddenly that the consciousness of their own strength 
came at the same instant with the removal of the ancient 
barrier to it. It united the colonies for the first time ; 
few things are more significant of the development of 
the colonies than the outburst of plans for colonial union 
between 1748 and 1755, the most promising, though it 
finally failed, being that of Franklin (1754) at the 
.Albany conference of Indian commissioners from the 
various colonies. The practical union of the colonies, 
however, was so evident that it might have been foreseen 
that they would now unite instinctively against any com- 
mon enemy, even the mother country. 

34. The war, too, while it obtained its main object in 
the view of the colonies — an unlimited western expan- 

The conquered siou — brought thc sccds of enmity between 
territory, thcm aud thc crowu. The claims of the 
English on the continent, as has been said, were based 
on the voyages of the Cabots. Under them the crown 
had granted in the charters of Massachusetts, Connec- 
ticut, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia 
a western extension at first to the Pacific Ocean and 
finally to the Mississippi. This was what the colonies 
had fought for; and yet at the end of the war (1763) 
a royal proclamation was issued forbidding present land 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXPANSION. 31 

sales west of the Alleghanies and practically reserving 
the conquered territory as a crown domain. In this, if 
in nothing else, lay the seeds of the coming revolution, 
as it afterwards almost disrupted the rising Union. The 
war had welded the thirteen colonies into one people, 
though they hardly dreamed of it yet ; they had an 
underlying consciousness that this western territory be- 
longed to the new people, not to the crown or to the sep- 
arate colonies which had charter claims to it ; and they 
would have resisted the claims of the crown as promptly 
as they afterwards resisted the claims of the individual 
colonies. 

35. Finally, the war broke the feeling of dependence 
on the mother country. Poorly armed, equipped, and dis- 
ciplined, the colonial or " provincial " troops Effects of the 
had certainly shown fighting qualities of no ^^''• 
mean order. Colonists would not have been disposed, 
under any circumstances, to underrate the military qual- 
ities of their own men, but their self-glorification found 
a larger material because of the frequently poor quality 
of the officers who were sent through family and court 
influence to represent Great Britain in the colonies. 
The bitter words in which Junius refers to British mili- 
tary organization in after years were certainly even more 
applicable in 1750 ; and the incompetency of many of 
the British officers is almost incomprehensible. Its 
effects were increased by an utter indifference to the 
advice of colonial leaders which, in a new and unknown 
country, was certain to place British soldiers again and 
again in positions where they appeared to great disad- 
vantage alongside of their colonial allies or rivals. The 
provincial who had stood his ground, firing from behind 
trees and stumps, while the regulars ran past him in 



32 THE UNITED STATES. 

headlong retreat, came home with a sense of his own 
innate superiority which was sure to bring its results. 
Braddock's defeat was the prologue to Bunker Hill. The 
results were strengthened by the fact that most of the 
war was fought either in New England, the most demo- 
cratic of the colonies, or by New England men. Their 
leaders had always been sought for by annual popu- 
lar elections and re-elections, the promotion of approved 
men, and the retention of men of poorer quality in lower 
grades of office. To them the aristocratic influences 
which gave place and power to such men as Loudoun 
and " Mrs. Nabbycrombie " were simply ridiculous, and 
marked only an essential difference between themselves 
and their English brethren which was to the disadvan- 
tage of the latter, even though it occasionally evolved a 
man like Howe or Pitt. Taking all the influences to- 
gether, it is plain that the French and Indian war not 
only brought into being a tangible union of the colonies, 
but broke many of the cords which had held the colonies 
to the mother country. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 33 



III. 

THE STRUGGLE FOR UNIOK 
1763-75. 

36. It is generally believed that the abandonment of 
North America by France was the result of profound 
policy, — that she foresaw that her retirement would be 
followed by the independence of the English colonies, 
and that Great Britain's temporary aggrandizement 
would result in a more profound abasement. Vergennes 
and Choiseul both stated the case in just this way in 
1763 ; and yet it may be doubted whether this was not 
rather an excuse for yielding to necessity than a politi- 
cal motive. At all events, it is certain that the peace, 
even with its release of the colonies from French pres- 
sure, was not enough to secure colonial union. For this 
it was necessary that the home Government should go 
on and release the colonists from their controlling feeling 
that they were rather Englishmen than Americans. 

37. This feeling was not an easy one to eradicate, for 
it was based in blood, training, and sympathies of every 
nature. It would not have been easy to dis- ^ ,. ^ 

''^ English sym- 

tinguish the American from the Englishman ; pathies of the 
it would, indeed, have been less easy than 
now, when the full effects of a great stream of immigra- 
tion have begun to appear. American portraits of the 
time show typical English faces. Wherever life was 



34 THE UNITED STATES. 

relieved of the privations involved in colonial struggle, 
the person at once reverted to the type which was then 
the result of corresponding conditions in England. The 
traditions of American officers were English ; their meth- 
ods were English; even the attitude which they took 
towards the private soldiers of their armies was that 
which was characteristic of the English officer of the 
time. In the South the men who led and formed public 
opinion had almost all been trained in England and were 
ingrained with English sympathies and even prejudices. 
In the North the acute general intellect had long ago 
settled upon the " common rights of Englishmen " as the 
bulwark behind which they could best resist any attempt 
on their liberties. The pride of the colonists in their 
position as Englishmen found a medium of expression 
in enthusiasm for ^^ the young king " ; and it would be 
hard to imagine a more loyal appendage of the crown 
than its English colonies in North America in 1760. 

38. Unfortunately, the peace of Paris did not result 

merely in freeing the colonies from dependence on the 

Change of Eng- mother couutry ; it had the more important 

lish policy, effect of freeing the mother country from 
fear of France, and of thus encouraging it to open a 
controversy with the colonies which had not been ven- 
tured on before. Quebec had hardly fallen and given 
the home Government promise of success when the work 
was begun (1761). The Board of Trade began to revive 
those regulations of colonial trade which had been prac- 
tically obsolete in New England ; and its customs officers 
applied to the Massachusetts courts for " writs of assist- 
ance " to enable them to enforce the regulations. Instant 
resistance was offered to the attempt to burden the 
colonies with these writs, which governed all men, were 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 35 

returnable nowhere, gave the officers absolute power, and 
opened every man's house and property to their entrance. 
The argument of the crown advocates based the power 
of issuing such writs on parliament's extension of the 
English revenue system to the colonies, backed by a 
statute of Charles II. permitting writs of assistance ; to 
refuse to grant the writs was therefore to impeach the 
power of parliament to legislate for the colonies. The 
counter-argument of James Otis was the key-note of the 
revolution. It declared in terms that no Act of parlia- 
ment could establish such a writ, that it would be a 
nullity even if it were expressed in the very terms which 
the customs officers claimed, and that " an Act of parlia- 
ment against the constitution was void." 

39. Perhaps Otis meant by " the constitution " merely 
the fundamental relations between the mother country 
and the colonies, for this claim was the first ^, ^ 

' _ _ The English 

step on the way to the final irreconcilable theory of colonial 
difference as to these relations. The English "^^^^' 
theory of the connection had been completely put into 
shape by 1760, with very little objection from the colon- 
ists, whose attention had not yet been strongly drawn to 
the subject. It held that even the two charter colonies, 
and a fortiori still more such a royal province as New 
York, were merely corporations, erected by the king, but 
subject to all the English laws relating to such corpora- 
tions. The king was their visitor, to inquire into and 
correct their misbehaviors ; his courts, on quo warranto, 
could dissolve them ; and parliament had the same om- 
nipotent power over them which it had over any other 
civil corporation, — to check, amend, punish, or dissolve 
them. These propositions must have seemed unquestion- 
able to the English legal mind in 1763. Their weak 



36 THE UNITED STATES. 

point, the assumption that parliament had power to con- 
trol a corporation extra quatuor maria, had been covered 
by a new development of the English theory during the 
century. Parliament, originally a merely English body, 
had grown in its powers and claims until now the common 
use of the phrase " imperial parliament " connoted claims 
to which the "four seas" were no longer a limitation, in 
law or fact. Parliament was to give the law to the whole 
empire. Hitherto this had been developed as a purely 
legal theory ; it was now first attempted to be put into 
practice when the enforcement of the Navigation Acts 
was begun in 1761. The first objections offered by the 
colonists were easily shown to be illogical and incon- 
sistent with this legal theory of the relations between 
the home country and the colonies, but this only drove 
the colonists higher, step by step, in their objections, — 
from objections to taxation by parliament into objections 
to legislation by parliament, — until they had developed, 
about 1775, a theory of their own, logical enough in itself, 
but so inconsistent with the English theory that war was 
the consequence of their collision. 

40. Passing over the intermediate steps, the form 
which the colonial theory finally took amounted to this. 
The colonists' Thc iutroductiou of the idea of an "imperial 
theory. parliament" was itself a revolution, which 
could not bind the colonists, or change the conditions 
under which they had settled the new country. Their 
relations, originally and properly, had been with the 
crown alone, and they had had nothing to do with parlia- 
ment. The crown had seen fit to constitute new domin- 
ions for itself beyond the seas, with forms of government 
which were irrepealable compacts between it and the peo- 
ple whom it had thus induced to settle the new territory, 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 37 



and not mere civil corporations. It would follow, then, 
that the king was no longer king merely of Great Britain 
and Ireland ; he had at least thirteen kingdoms beyond 
seas, and a parliament in each of them. For the British 
parliament to interfere with the special concerns of 
Massachusetts was as flagrant a wrong as it would have 
been for the parliament of Massachusetts to interfere 
with the affairs of Great Britain; and Massachusetts 
had a right to expect her king to protect her from such 
a wrong. The subject of Massachusetts knew the king 
only as king of Massachusetts, and the parliament of 
Great Britain not at all. It needed many years of suc- 
cessful but suicidal logic on the part of their opponents 
to force the Americans to this point ; they even continued 
to petition parliament until 1774; but after that time 
they were no further inconsistent, and held that the king 
was the only bond of union between the parts of the 
empire. When he wanted money from his American 
dominions, he was to get it, as he had always got it, by 
applying to the assembly of the colony, through the 
governor, for a grant. In the new seats of the race, as 
in the old, an Englishman was to be taxed only by his 
own representatives. In other words, each of the English 
colonies claimed, in its own field and for its own citizens, 
the exact principles of " English liberty " which had been 
established in England as the relations of the English 
subject to the crown. Each colony was to be governed 
by its own laws, just as in Jersey and Guernsey, in 
Scotland before the Union, or in Hanover in 1763, with 
appeal to the king in council, not to English courts or to 
the House of Lords. For the British parliament, or still 
more the British citizen, to talk of "our sovereignty" 
over the colonies was a derogation from the king's sov- 



38 THE UNITED STATES. 

ereignty, the only sovereignty which the colonies knew. 
"I am quite sick of 'our sovereignty,'" wrote Franklin 
in 1769. The case of the colonies was evidently that of 
Ireland also ; and Franklin notes the fact that several 
members of colonial assemblies had been admitted to the 
privileges of the Irish parliament, on the ground that 
they were members of '' American parliaments." To this 
statement of their case the Americans adhered with pro- 
gressive closeness from 1763 until the end. In their final 
Declaration of Independence it will be found that it is a 
declaration of their independence of the king only ; they 
do not then admit that the British parliament had ever 
had any authority over them ; and that hodij is only 
mentioned in one place, in 'one of the counts of the 
indictment of the king, for having given his assent to 
certain " acts of pretended legislation," passed by " a 
jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknowl- 
edged by our laws," that is to say, by the British parlia- 
ment. 

41. Two irreconcilable theories were thus presented. 
Between them were two courses, either of which the 
Possible com- colouics wcrc willing to accept. Under their 
promises, thcory there was no "imperial parliament." 
They were willing to have one constituted, even if it 
were only a development of the British parliament 
through admission of colonial representatives ; but the 
time for this passed before the parties could debate it. 
On the other hand, the colonies were willing to abandon 
to the wealthier British parliament, which sustained so 
much larger a proportion of the cost of the standing 
army and navy, the privilege of regulating external trade 
for the general good. So late as 1774 the Continental 
Congress, while maintaining the sole right of the colonial 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 39 

assemblies to levy internal taxation and make local laws, 
declared their willingness to yield to the British parlia- 
ment the power to make snch regulations of external 
trade as were bona fide meant to benefit trade, and not 
to raise a revenue from Americans without their own 
consent. This solution could have been only temporary 
at best, and war cut off any discussion of it. 

42. The work of quiet revolution was begun in March, 
1763, in the closing hours of the Bute ministry, Charles 
Townshend being first lord of trade and administrator of 
the colonies. It was decided to make a point of having 
all the American judges and other officials hold office dur- 
ing the king's pleasure, and to make their salaries inde- 
pendent of the colonial assemblies. The army estimates 
were increased by an American standing force of twenty 
regiments, to be paid for by Great Britain for the first 
year, and thereafter out of a revenue to be raised in 
America by Act of parliament. Bute's purposes were 
political, — the diminution of democracy in America. The 
Wilkes uproar drove him out of power before he could 
develop his plans ; but his successor, Grenville, followed 
them out for financial reasons, and in February, 1765, the 
Stamp Act " was passed through both Houses 

with less opposition than a turnpike bilL" ^ amp c . 

43. For the past two years the colonists had had other 
things to think of. Under Grenville the Acts in restraint 
of colonial trade (§§ 20, 21), which had been The Navigation 
allowed to become practically obsolete, were '-^^^• 
put into force with unsparing rigor. The numbers of 
the customs officers were increased; their duties were 
more plainly declared ; naval officers were encouraged to 
take the oaths of customs officers and share in the plun- 
der of the commerce which had grown up between Amer- 



40 THE UNITED STATES. 

ica and the West Indian Islands and other parts of the 
world. Search was constant; confiscation usually fol- 
lowed search; and appeal was even more costly than 
confiscation. In the confusion arising from the efforts 
of American commerce to escape its new enemies, it was 
not wonderful that other questions were allowed to go 
by default. But the mutterings of resistance were heard. 
The Massachusetts assembly protested against any 
schemes to create a standing army in America, to make 
ofiicers independent of the assemblies, or to raise a reve- 
nue without consent of the assemblies, and appointed a 
committee to secure the united action of all the colonies. 
This was the first movement in the struggle for union. 
Its importance was hidden from the ministry by the offi- 
cial class in the colonies, whose members — the governors, 
judges, and other crown officials — continued to urge a 
persistence in the new policy, and to represent the 
Adamses, Otis, and the other colonial leaders as animated 
by a perverse desire to destroy the unity of the empire. 

44. The revenue to be raised by the Stamp Act was to 
come from the sale of stamps and stamped paper for 
marriage licenses, commercial transactions, suits at law, 
transfers of real estate, inheritances, publications, and 
some minor sources of revenue. With it was another 
startling provision, — a command to the colonial assem- 
blies to furnish the royal troops in America with fuel, can- 
dles, vinegar, bedding, cooking utensils, and potables, and 
permission to billet the troops in inns, alehouses, barns, 
and vacant houses. The colonies were thus to be taxed 
without their consent ; the revenue derived therefrom was 
to be devoted to the support of a standing army; and 
that army was in turn to be used for the maintenance of 
the scheme of taxation. Yet no one in England seems to 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 41 

have dreamed of American resistance to it ; and Gren- 
ville was able to say in 1770 that he "did not foresee the 
opposition to the measure, and would have staked his life 
for obedience." 

45. The news of the passage of the Stamp Act caused 
all America to hum with the signs of resistance, but 
forcible resistance was at first repudiated Resistance to 
everywhere. It took the shape, really more ^^e stamp Act. 
significant, of declarations by the colonial assemblies, 
the lower or popular houses of the legislatures. The 
Virginia assembly, under the lead of Patrick Henry and 
the younger members, took the first step (May, 1765), 
by a declaration of colonial rights covering the right of 
each colony to make its own laws and impose and expend 
its own taxation. The Massachusetts assembly followed 
with the formal proposal of an American Congress, to be 
composed of representatives of all the colonies. South 
Carolina seconded the call ; and the first step on the road 
to union was taken. 

46. Outside of these formal steps there were signs of 
a less formal popular resistance. Even peaceable resis- 
tance was pro tanto a suspension of royal and parliamen- 
tary authority in the colonies ; and it was probably in- 
evitable that the colonial assemblies should succeed to 
the power during the interregnum before the organization 
of a real national power. But a temporary chaos was as 
inevitable ; and the form it took was the formation, par- 
ticularly in the North, of popular organizations known 
as "Sons of Liberty," the name being taken .-sonsofLib- 
from a chance allusion in one of Barry's ^^^•" 
speeches in the House of Commons. These, backed fre- 
quently by the town organizations, forced the stamp-offi- 
cers to resign, and destroyed the stamps wherever they 



42 THE UNITED STATES^ 

could be found. The Connecticut stamp-officer, as lie 
rode into Hartford on his white horse to deposit his resig- 
nation, with a thousand armed farmers riding after him, 
said that he felt " like death on the pale horse, with all 
hell following him." Newspapers and pamphlets rang 
every possible change on Coke's dictum that "an Act of 
parliament contrary to Magna Charta was void," and with 
warnings to stamp-officers that they would be considered 
enemies to the liberties of America if they attempted to 
carry out their duties. When the day broke on which the 
Act was to go into operation (November 1, 1765) America 
had neither stamps nor stamp-officers with which to fulfil 
its provisions. 

47. The proposed Congress, commonly called the 
" Stamp- Act Congress," met at New York (October 7, 
stamp- Act Con- 1765), — Ncw Hampshire, Virginia, North Car- 
gress. olina, and Georgia being acquiescent but not 
represented. It petitioned the king, the House of Com- 
mons, and the House of Lords to recognize fully "the 
several governments formed in the said colonies, with 
full powers of legislation, agreeably to the principles of 
the English constitution." It also put forth a declara- 
tion of colonial rights, acknowledging allegiance to the 
crown, and claiming " all the inherent rights and privi- 
leges of natural-born subjects within the kingdom of 
Great Britain," including the right of petition, of trial by 
jury, of taxation by representatives, and of granting sup- 
plies to the crown, and protesting against the Stamp Act 
and the various Acts in restraint of trade. The action 
of this congress was thus purely declaratory ; there was 
no attempt to legislate ; and the importance of the meet- 
ing was in its demonstration of the possibility of union 
and of one road to it. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 43 

48. In the meantime the Grenville ministry had fallen 
(July, 1765), and the Rockingham ministry (March, 1766) 
repealed the Stamp Act. The repeal was Repeal of the 
supported by Pitt, and Whigs who agreed stamp Act. 
with him, on the distinction that taxation by parlia- 
ment without colonial representation was in violation 
of the essential principles of the British constitution, but 
that the power of parliament to legislate in every other 
point for all parts of the empire must be maintained 
(§ 21). Nevertheless, the repeal was preceded by a dec- 
laration of the power " of the king in parliament to bind 
the colonies and people of America in all cases what- 
soever." 

49. The colonists received the repeal with an outburst 
of rejoicing loyalty. They cared little for Pitt's distinc- 
tion of powers, or even for the declaratory Act : it seemed 
to them merely the honors of war with which the min- 
istry was to be allowed to retire. It really meant much 
more. The ruling interest in the home Government, dis- 
ordered for the moment by its sudden discovery of the 
strength and union of the colonies, had drawn back, but 
not forever. All through the year an undercurrent of 
irritation against the colonies is evident ; and, when 
(June, 1767) Townshend, the chancellor of lownshend's 
the exchequer, had wrested the lead from the ^<=^5- 
other members of the Grafton ministry, he passed 
through both Houses the bill for taxing imports into the 
colonies, to go into effect on 20th November following. 
It laid duties on glass, paper, painters^ colors, lead and 
tea. As the proceeds were for the exchequer, they were 
to be distributed by the crown ; and there was no secret 
that the design was to provide salaries for the crown 
servants in North America. About the same time other 



44 THE UNITED STATES. 

Acts established a board of customs at Boston, legalized 
tlie "writs of assistance," and suspended the New York 
assembly until it should obey the Billeting Act. Town- 
shend died soon after, leaving his system as a legacy to 
his successor. Lord North. 

50. The New York assembly granted the necessary 
money, said nothing as to its use, and escaped further 
molestation. Beyond this the Acts accomplished noth- 
ing. Their advocates had urged that the colonies ad- 
mitted the power of parliament to control external 
commerce, and that the new taxes were an exercise of 
such control. If they desired a purely technical triumph 
they had it, for their logic was sound, and the taxes 
remained on the statute-book. But, as the colonies 
Non-importation ccascd to import the taxed articles, by popu- 

agreement. j^g^j. agreement and enforcement, the taxes 
amounted to little. The irritations caused by the en- 
forcement of the Navigation Act, only increased in bit- 
terness ; and the official class in the colonies, on whom 
must forever rest the responsibility for nine-tenths of 
the difficulties which followed, lost no chance of rep- 
resenting every pamphlet, newspaper letter, or public 
meeting as incipient rebellion. A popular outburst in 
Boston (June, 1768) following the seizure of John Han- 
cock's sloop " Liberty," was thus used to give that town 
an unenviable reputation for disorder and violence. 
Colonial officials everywhere openly or secretly urged 
the strongest measures ; and all the while the colonists, 
with the cautious tenacity of their race, were acting so 
guardedly that the British attorney-general was com- 
pelled to say, " Look into the papers and see how well 
these Americans are versed in the crown law; I doubt 
whether they have been guilty of an overt act of treason, 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 45 

but I am sure they have come within a hair's-breadth 
of it." 

51. The colonial officials, hoping for salaries inde- 
pendent of the assemblies, began to show ^ disposition 
to govern without those bodies. When the Massachu- 
setts assembly refused by a large vote to withdraw its 
circular letter to the other assemblies urging united peti- 
tion to the king alone, as an umpire between themselves 
and the British parliament, for redress of grievances, the 
assembly was prorogued, and did not reassemble for a 
year. As a gentle hint of a possible mode of re-estab- 
lishing popular government, delegates from the towns 
met in convention at Boston (September, 1768), renewed 
the protests against the Acts of the ministry, and pro- 
vided for the maintenance of public order. In the fol- 
lowing December and January parliament passed a vote 
of censure on this proceeding, and advised that those 
who had taken part in it should be sent to England for 
trial on the charge of treason. This was a new grievance 
for the assemblies. They passed remonstrances against 
any attempt to send Americans beyond seas for trial, as 
a violation of the citizen's right to trial by a jury from 
the vicinage; and their governors at once prorogued 
them. Civil government in the colonies, under its origi- 
nal constitution, was evidently in sore straits. 

52. In September, 1768, two British regiments which 
the colonial officials had succeeded in obtaining arrived 
at Boston. Instead of a rebellious population Difficulties at 
they found their most formidable opponents Boston. 

in minute law points which were made to beset them at 
every turn. The Billeting Act required the ordinary 
barracks to be filled first : the council would assign no 
quarters in town until the barracks outside were filled. 



4G THE UNITED STATES. 

The assembly was not in session to authorize anything 
further, and the governor did not dare to summon it. 
The troops, who had marched into the town as into a 
captured place, with sixteen rounds of ammunition per 
man, were presently without a place in which to cook 
their dinners, until their commander hired houses out of 
the army chest. It was natural that he should denounce 
" this country where every man studies law." Exasper- 
ating and exasperated, the troops lived on in Boston until 
(March, 1770) a street brawl between soldiers and citizens 
resulted in the death of five of the latter and the injury 
of six more. Still the town kept its temper. The cap- 
tain who had given the order to fire was seized by the 
civil authorities, subjected to the ordinary trial for mur- 
der, defended by John Adams and Quincy, two Massa- 
chusetts leaders, at the hazard of their own popularity, 
and acquitted for lack of evidence. But while according 
a fair trial to the soldiers, the colonial leaders at last 
represented so plainly to the crown officials the immi- 
nence of an outbreak that the troops were removed from 
the town to a fort in the harbor. 

53. The most significant point in the history of the 
four years 1770-73 is the manner in which the ordi- 

The colonial nary colonial governments continued to go to 
governments, pieccs. Whcu thc asscmblics met they would 
do nothing but denounce the Acts of the ministry ; when 
they were prorogued the colony was left without any 
government for which there was popular respect. This 
was about the state of affairs which the crown officials 
had desired ; but now that it had come, they were not at 
all prompt in their use of it. Divorced from regular 
government the people put out still stronger efforts to 
enforce the non-importation agreements which had kept 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 47 

down the revenues from the tax-laws of 1767. About 
1773 a further development appeared. As soon as the 
assemjblies met for their annual sessions, and before 
the governors conld find excuse for proroguing them, 
they appointed " committees of correspondence," to main- 
tain unity of action with the other colonies. Thus, even 
after prorogation, there was still in existence for the 
rest of the year a semi-official representation of the 
colony. This was nearly the last step on the way to 
colonial union. 

54. The whites had already crossed the Alleghanies. 
In 1768 parties from North Carolina entered Tennessee ; 
and in 1769 Boone and a party of Virgin- westem settie- 
ians entered Kentucky. The settlement of f^^"^- 
Tennessee was hastened by difficulties with Tryon, the 
governor of North Carolina. Tryon was one of the 
worst of the crown officials ; and his government had 
been a scandal, even for those times. The people, denied 
justice and defrauded of legislative power, rose in hasty 
insurrection and were defeated. Tryon used his victory 
so savagely as to drive an increasing stream of settlers 
over the mountains into Tennessee. The centres of 
western settlement, however, were but few. There was 
one at Pittsburgh, another at Detroit, another near the 
Illinois-Indiana boundary, another in Kentucky, another 
near the present city of Nashville, Tennessee ; but none 
of these, except, perhaps, Detroit, was more than a hunt- 
ing or trading camp. Some efforts had been made to 
erect crown colonies, or to settle grants to companies, in 
the western territory, but they came to nothing. The 
settlements still clung to the coast. 

55. In April, 1770, encouraged by some symptoms of 
a failure of the non-importation agreements, the ministry 



48 THE UNITED STATES. 

had taken off all the taxes of 1767, retaining only that 
upon tea, — threepence per pound. The general popular 
agreement was still strong enough to prevent 
the importation of this single luxury ; and it 
was found in 1772 that the tax produced but about £80 
a year, at an expense of two or three hundred thousand 
for collection. Besides, the East India Company had 
been accumulating a stock of teas, in anticipation of an 
American market, of which the tea tax had deprived it. 
In May, 1773, the ministry took a fresh step : the tax 
was to be retained, but the Company was to be allowed 
a drawback of the entire duty, — so that the colonists, 
while really paying the tax and yielding the underlying 
principle, would get their tea cheaper than any other 
people. The first cargoes of tea under the new regula- 
tions were ordered home again by popular meetings in 
the American ports, and their captains generally obeyed. 
At Boston the governor refused to clear the vessels for 
Europe; and, after prolonged discussion, some fifty per- 
sons, disguised as Indians, went on board the vessels and 
threw the tea into the harbor in the presence of a great 
crowd of lookers-on (December 16, 1773). 

56. It was not possible that the term American should 
suddenly supplant that of Englishman ; but the succes- 
The new sivc stcps by which the change was accom- 
nationai feeling, pUshcd arc caslly perceptiblc. Using one of 
the old English political phrases the supporters of colo- 
nial privileges had begun about 1768 to adopt the name 
of "American Whigs." Its increasing substitution for 
that of Englishmen was significant. Within a few years 
the terms "continental,'^ or "the continent," began to 
take on a new meaning, referring to a union of the colo- 
nies at which men hardly ventured to hint clearly. It 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 49 

meant a good deal, then, when men said very truly that 
^'the whole continent" applauded the "Boston tea-party." 
It was the first spoken word of the new national spirit. 
Nothing was less understood in England ; the outbreak 
left America in general, and Boston in particular, hardly 
a friend there. The burning of the revenue schooner 
" Gaspee " in Narragansett Bay (June, 1772) had seemed 
to the ministry almost an act of overt rebellion ; this was 
rebellion itself. 

57. In March and April, 1774, on receipt of full intelli- 
gence of the proceedings at Boston, the ministry passed a 
series of Acts which made open struggle only jhe "intoiera- 
a question of time. The Boston Port Act bieActs." 
shut up the town of Boston against all commerce until 
the destroyed tea was paid for and the town returned to 
loyalty. The Massachusetts Act changed the charter of 
that colony : the crown was now to appoint governor, 
council, and sheriffs ; the sheriffs were to select juries ; 
and town meetings, unless by permission of the governor, 
were forbidden. Gage, the British commander-in-chief 
in the colonies, was made governor under the Act, and 
four regiments were given him as a support. Any magis- 
trates, officers, or soldiers indicted under colonial laws 
were to be sent for trial to Nova Scotia or Great Britain. 
The billeting of soldiers in the town of Boston was legal- 
ized. The Quebec Act extended the boundaries of the 
province of Canada over the whole territory lying north 
of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi. Here the minis- 
try rested. 

58. The news of these Acts of parliament crystallized 
every element of union in the colonies. The 

attack on the charter of Massachusetts Bay 

was undoubtedly the most effective. The charters of 



50 THE UNITED STATES. 

Connecticut and Khode Island were the freest of the 
colonies ; but that of Massachusetts was certainly next 
to them. If Massachusetts was not safe against such an 
attack, no colony was safe. The ministry had forced an 
issue on the very point on which the colonial and impe- 
rial theories were irreconcilable. The Boston Port Act 
furnished a grievance so concrete as to obviate the neces- 
sity of much argument on other points. The Quebec 
Act, with its attempt to cut off the northern colonies 
from the western expansion to which they all looked 
hopefully, was bad enough in itself, but it brought up 
with it the element of religious suspicion. For years 
the distinctively Puritan element had dreaded an attempt 
to establish the Church of England in the colonies ; and 
the inclination of American Episcopalians to look to the 
home government for relief against unjust local restric- 
tions had not helped to decrease the feeling. The Puri- 
tan element could see little real difference between Epis- 
copacy and Catholicism : and, when it was found that the 
Quebec Act practically established the Eoman Catholic 
system in the new territory, the old dread revived to give 
the agitation a hidden but strong motive. 

59. The necessity of another Congress was universally 
felt. On the suggestion of Virginia and the call of Mas- 
First continen- sachusetts, it met at Philadelphia (September 
tai Congress. 5^1774). All tlic colouics but Gcorgia wcrc 
represented ; and Georgia was so certainly in sympathy 
with the meeting that this is commonly known as the 
First Continental Congress, the first really national 
body in American history. Its action was still mainly 
deliberative. It adopted addresses to the king, and to 
the people of the colonies, of Quebec, and of Great 
Britain, and passed a declaration of colonial rights, sum- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 51 

ming ujo the various Acts of parliament which were 
held to be in violation of these rights. But its tone was 
changed, though its language was still studiously con- 
trolled and dignified. It was significant that, for the 
first time, the two Houses of Parliament were ignored in 
the matter of petitioning : it was at last seen to be an 
awkward concession even to memorialize parliament. 
The tone of a sovereign about to take his seat is per- 
ceptible in the letter of Congress to the colonies which 
had not yet sent delegates. And at least two steps were 
taken which, if not an assumption of sovereign powers, 
were evidently on the road to it. The first was the prep- 
aration of Articles of Association, to be signed by the 
people everywhere, and to be enforced by committees of 
safety chosen by the people of cities and towns. These 
articles bound the signers to stop the importation of all 
goods from, and the exportation of all goods to. Great 
Britain and Ireland, the use of such goods, and the 
slave trade. The manner of the enforcement of the arti- 
cles was evidently an incipient suspension of all authority 
proceeding from the mother country and the substitution 
of a general popular authority for it. The other step 
was a resolution, adopted October 8, as follows : — " That 
this Congress approve the opposition of the 
inhabitants of the Massachusetts Bay to the 
execution of the late Acts of parliament ; and if the 
same shall be attempted to be carried into execution by 
force, in such case all America ought to support them in 
their opposition." This was simply an ultimatum : in the 
opinion of Congress, the ministry could take no further 
step except that of attempting to enforce its Acts, and 
the colonies would resist such an attempt as an act of 
war. Before the next Congress met the conditions had 



52 THE UNITED STATES. 

been fullilled. The agents of the ministry had applied 
force ; Massachusetts had resisted by force ; and the new 
Congress found itself the representative of a nation at 
war, still acknowledging the king, but resisting the oper- 
ations of his armies. Having summoned a new Congress 
to meet at Philadelphia on the 10th of May following, 
and having cleared the way for its action, the Eirst Con- 
tinental Congress adjourned. 

60. It is an unpleasant task to record the successive 
steps by which two peoj)les, so exactly similar to one 
another in every characteristic, so far removed from one 
another, and so ignorant of one another's feelings, ad- 
vanced alternately to a point where open collision was 
inevitable. From the standpoint of ^^no taxation with- 
out representation," which Pitt and his school of Whigs 
had approved, the colonists had now been driven by the 
suicidal logic of their opponents to the far more consis- 
tent position of " no legislation without representation," 
which the Pitt school had never been willing to grant, 
and which was radically inconsistent with the British 
" imperial " theory. Either the previous legislation of 
parliament was to remain a dead letter, or it must be 
executed by force ; and that meant war. Massachusetts 
was already on the brink of that event. Gage, the new 
governor, had refused to meet the assembly ; he had forti- 
fied himself in Boston, and was sending out spies as if 
into hostile territory. All regular government was sus- 
pended or remanded to the towns ; and the people were 
organized into " minute men," pledged to move at a min- 
ute's notice. The first hostile movement of Gage would 
be the signal for the struggle. War, in fact, had come 
to be a possibility in the thoughts of every one. The 
new governor of Canada, Carleton, was sent out with in- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 53 

structions to levy the people and Indians of that prov- 
ince, in order that they might be marched against rebels 
in any province of North America. Governor Tryon's 
defeat of the insurgent people of North Carolina at the 
Alemance (§ 54) furnished a tempting precedent to Grov- 
ernor Gage in Massachusetts. There was strong pressure 
upon him to induce him to follow it. The king's speech 
at the opening of parliament (November 29, 1774) spoke 
of the prevalent "resistance and disobedience to the 
law " in Massachusetts ; the ministry urged Gage to 
arrest the colonial leaders, even though hostilities should 
follow ; the two Houses of Parliament presented a joint 
address to the king, declaring Massachusetts to be in 
rebellion, and offering all the resources of the empire to 
suppress the rebellion ; and the king, in reply, announced 
his intention of acting as parliament wished. 

61. The inevitable collision was narrowly escaped in 
February, 1775. Gage sent a water Expedition to Salem 
to search for powder ; but the day was Sunday, Lexington and 
and a conflict was prevented by the ministers. Concord. 
Another expedition (April 19) was more momentous. 
It set out for Concord, a little village some twenty miles 
from Boston, to seize a stock of powder which was re- 
ported to be gathered there. At daybreak the troops 
marched into the village of Lexington, on their road. 
They found some minute men who had been hastily 
summoned, for intelligence had been sent out from 
Boston that the expedition was coming. There was 
a hurried order from an officer that the militia should 
disperse, then a volley from his men and a few answer- 
ing shots, and the first blood of the American revolution 
had been shed. The troops went on to Concord and 
destroyed the stores there. But by this time the whole 



54 THE UNITED STATES. 

country was up. Messengers were riding in every direc- 
tion, arousing the minute men ; and their mustering made 
the return to Boston more dangerous than the advance 
had been. When the troops began their return march 
the continuous fire from fences, trees, and barns along 
the route soon converted the retreat into a rout. The 
opportune arrival of a rescuing party from Boston saved 
the whole force from surrender, but the pursuit was kept 
up until the expedition took refuge under the guns of 
the war vessels at the water-side. The next morning the 
isthmus which connected the town of Boston with the 
mainland was blockaded ; the siege of Boston was formed ; 
and the revolution had begun. 

62. The news of Lexington and Concord fights set the 
continent in a flame, but every feature of the outburst 
showed the still thoroughly English characteristics of the 
people. For nine long years they had been schooling 
themselves to patience ; and, as their impatience became 
more difficult to control, it was shown most strongly in 
their increasingly scrupulous care to insist upon the letter 
of the law. Even in the first open conflict the colonists 
were careful to base their case on their legal right to use 
" the king's highway '' ; and Congress carefully collected 
and published depositions going to show that the troops 
had violated this right and had fired first. There was 
everything in the affairs of Lexington and Concord to 
arouse an intense popular excitement : the mustering of 
undisciplined farmers against regular troops, the stern 
sense of duty which moved it, the presence and encourage- 
ment of the ministers, the sudden desolation of homes 
which had never known war before, were things which 
stirred every pulse in the colonies when they were told. 
But there was no need of waiting for such stories. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 55 

When the dam burst, the force which had been stored up 
for nine years took everything away before it. The news 
was hurried by express along the roads to the southward ; 
men left the plough in the furrow when they heard it, 
and rode off to Boston ; town committees of safety col- 
lected money and provisions and sent them to the same 
point; and before the end of the month the mainland 
around Boston harbor was occupied by a shifting mass 
of undisciplined half-armed soldiers, sufficient to keep 
the British troops cooped up within the peninsula on 
which the town was built. 

63. The overturning of the royal governments in North 
America followed rapidly, as the news of the fights at 
Lexington and Concord spread abroad. In Popular 
one colony after another the lower houses of governments. 
the colonial legislatures, taking the name of " provincial 
congresses," met and assumed the reins of government ; 
the officers of militia and subordinate magistrates ac- 
cepted commissions from them ; and the colonial officials, 
to whose advice so much of the course of events had 
been due, fled to England or to the nearest depot of 
royal troops. On the day (May 10, 1775) when the 
stronghold of Ticonderoga, the key of the gateway to 
Canada, was taken by surprise by an American force 
under Allen, giving the besiegers of Boston a welcome 
supply of weapons and ammunition, the Sec- second conti- 
ond Continental Congress met at Philadelphia. "®"^^' Congress. 
It came, under new circumstances, to redeem the pledge 
which its predecessor had given that all the colonies 
would support Massachusetts in resisting force by force. 
It was thus the representative of a united people, or 
of nothing. The struggle for union had been so far 
successful. 



56 THE UNITED STATES. 

64. This fact of union has colored the whole subse- 
quent history of the country. The Articles of Associa- 
tion had really preceded it by a substitution of general 
popular government, however clumsy in form, for the 
previously recognized governments ; in so far the author- 
ity of the various colonies was also suspended, and a 
general national organization took their place. It was 
soon found that the colonial organizations had too much 
innate strength to be got rid of in this summary fashion ; 
they held their own, and, as soon as imminent danger 
had disappeared, they succeeded in tearing so much 
power from the Continental Congress as to endanger the 
national existence itself. But, when the Second Conti- 
nental Congress met, it met (as Von Hoist maintains) as 
a purely revolutionary body, limited by no law, and by 
nothing else but by its success in war and the support 
which it was to receive from the people, without regard 
to colony governments. With the energy and reckless- 
ness of a French revolutionary body it might have 
blotted out the distinctions between colonies, and estab- 
lished a centralized government, to be modified in time 
by circumstances. In fact, it took no such direction. 
It began its course by recommendations to the new 
colonial governments ; it relied on them for executive 
acts ; and, as soon as the new colonies were fairly under 
way, they seized on the power of naming and recalling 

Failure of ^^^ dclcgatcs to thc Cougrcss. From that time 
the first national thc dccadcncc of the Congress was rapid; the 
^^^ ^"^' national idea became dimmer ; and the asser- 
tions of complete sovereignty by the political units be- 
came more pronounced. This failure of the Second 
Congress to appropriate the universal national poAvers 
which were within its grasp is responsible for two oppo- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 57 

site effects. On the one hand, it built up a basis for 
the future assertion of the notion of State sovereignty, 
necessarily including the right of secession. On the other, 
it maintained the peculiar feature of the American Union, 
its large State liberty, its dislike of centralization, and 
its feeling that the national power is a valuable but 
dangerous instrument of development. The effort to 
find a compromise between the two forces makes up the 
record of subsequent national politics, ending in the 
present assertion of the largest possible measure of 
State rights, but under the guarantee of the national 
power, not of the State's own sovereignty. 

Q^. The conversion of the former colonies into 
"States" followed hard upon the outbreak of the war 
(§ 72). Since that time the States have The state sys- 
really been the peculiar feature of the Ameri- ^^'^• 
can system. The circumstances just mentioned put them 
into a position in which they held all real powers of 
government ; and they are still the residuary legatees of 
all such powers as have not been taken from them by 
the national power or by their State constitutions. In 
1775 they differed very materially in their organization, 
but there has been a constant tendency to approach a 
general type, as States have adopted innovations which 
have proved successful in other States. All have now 
governors, legislatures of two houses, and State judicia- 
ries. The governor, except in a few States, has a limited 
vote on legislation, and has a pardoning power. The 
State legislature is supreme in all subjects relating to 
the jurisdiction of the State, with two exceptions ; the 
Constitution of the United States imposes certain limita- 
tions on them (§ 116), and there is an evident tendency 
in the later State constitutions to prohibit the legisla- 



5S THE UNITED STATES. 

tures from "special legislation," and to provide that, 
in specified subjects, they shall pass only " general 
laws," applicable to the whole State and all citizens 
alike. With these exceptions, it is difficult to imagine 
a more complete autonomy than is possessed by the 
States of the American Union. The main restriction 
upon their action is in its results upon their welfare. 
They may even repudiate their debts, and there is no 
power which can make them pay ; but, even in respect 
to this, the results upon the credit of a repudiating 
State have been enough to check others in any action of 
the kind. They control the organization of the State 
into counties, towns, and cities ; they touch the life and 
interests of the citizen in a far larger degree than does 
the Federal Government ; and, in many points, such as 
that of taxation, their powers are co-ordinate with those 
of the Federal Government, so that the two departments 
of the American governmental system operate on the 
same subjects. The admission of new States (§ 97) has 
raised the number of the original thirteen States to 
thirty-eight,^ and the powers of the new States are 
exactly those of the old ones. 

66. The "force resolution" of the First Congress 
(§ 59) shows that the national existence of the United 
States, in a purely political sense, dates from the fulfil- 
ment of the conditions of the force resolution — that is, 
from the first shot fired at Lexington. From that 
instant the fact of union was consummated in the sup- 
port given to Massachusetts by the other common- 
wealths ; and George III. was king no longer of thirteen 



1 The preliminary steps for the admission of four new States, how- 
ever, were taken by Congress in February, 1889. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR UNION. 59 

separate kingdoms, but of one. The fact that he did 
not recognize the union did not alter the fact of union ; 
that was to be decided by events. The success of the 
struggle for union gave the United States a date for the 
political, as distinguished from the legal, existence of 
the nation (April 19, 1775). 



60 THE UNITED STATES. 



ly. 

THE STRUGGLE FOE INDEPENDENCE. 

1775-83. 

67. The Second Congress adopted the " army " around 
Boston as " the American continental army " ; rules 

and articles of war were formulated for it ; 

and Ward, Charles Lee (a British soldier 
of fortune), Schuyler and Putnam were named as 
major-generals, with eight brigadiers, and Gates as 
adjutant-general. Union, though accomplished, was 
still weak. Sectional interests, feelings, and prejudices 
were strong ; and the efforts of the delegates to accom- 
modate them had, as one result, the appearance of 
Washington on the historical stage which he was to fill 
so completely. He had been of special service on the 
military committee of Congress ; and the Massachusetts 
members — the Adamses and others — saw in him the 
man whose appointment as commander-in-chief would be 
most acceptable to all the sections, and would " cement 
and secure the union of these colonies," as John Adams 
wrote in a private letter. He was chosen unanimously, 
and commissioned, and set out for Boston. But another 
collision, the battle of Bunker Hill, had taken place on 
the date of his commission (June 17). 

68. In one of the irregular surgings of the colonial 
force around Boston, it took possession of Breed's (now 
known as Bunker ) Hill, some 75 feet high, commanding 



THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 61 

Boston, and separated from it by a sheet of water. The 
British officers might have landed men so as to take the 
line of entrenchments in the rear, or might have raked it 
from end to end from the water. They chose to send 
2500 men over in boats, and charge straight up the hill. 
The all-important question was whether the " embattled 
farmers " within the works would stand fire. 
Not a shot from the line of entrenchments re- 
turned the scattering fire of the advancing column until 
the latter was within a hundred feet ; then a sheet of flame 
ran along the line, and, when the smoke cleared away, 
the charging troops were retreating down the hill. The 
officers moved the men again to the assault, with exactly 
the same result. At the third assault the ammunition 
of the farmers was exhausted ; but they retreated fight- 
ing stubbornly with gun-stocks, and even with stones. 
" The success," wrote Gage to the ministry, " has cost us 
dear ; the trials we have had show the rebels are not the 
despicable rabble too many have supposed them to be." 
He had lost 1100 out of 2500 men. A serious Ameri- 
can loss was that of Warren, a Boston leader of high 
promise. 

69. While Washington was endeavoring to form an 
army out of the heterogeneous material around Boston, 
another American force was attempting to 
drive the British out of Canada. On the last 
day of the year 1775, in an assault on Quebec, one of 
the leaders, Montgomery, was killed, and another, Ben- 
edict Arnold, was wounded. Shortly afterwards the 
American force was driven back into the northern part 
of New York, near the Canada line, where it held its 
ground. Congress began in June the issue of bills of 
credit, or "continental currency," as a substitute for 



62 THE UNITED STATES. 

taxation — a most unhappy step. The bills soon began 

to depreciate. Congress insisted on holding them to be 

legal tender ; but it had not seized, as it 

Paper currency. 

might have done, the power of taxation, in 
order to provide for the redemption of the bills ; and its 
recommendation to committees of safety to treat as ene- 
mies of their country those who should refuse to receive 
the bills at their face value, never accomplished its 
object. Successive emissions of paper enabled Congress 
to support the army for a few years, and even to begin 
the organization of a navy. Privateers and public armed 
vessels had been sent out by the several colonies ; the 
first American fleet, of eight vessels, sailed in February, 
1776, but its cruise accomplished little. 

70. All this time, Congress had been protesting its 
horror of the idea of independence; and the colonial 
Drift towards congrcsscs had instructed their delegates not 
independence, ^q countcnance any such project. The last 
petition to the king was adopted by Congress in July, 
1775, and sent to London by the hands of Richard Penn. 
It besought the king to consider the complaints of the 
colonists, and to obtain the repeal of the Acts which 
they had found intolerable. The news of the battle of 
Bunker Hill had preceded Penn ; the king refused to 
answer the petition ; but by a proclamation (August 23, 
1775) he announced the existence of open rebellion in 
the colonies, and called on all good subjects to give any 
information of those persons in Great Britain who were 
aiding and abetting the rebellion. This was but the 
first of a series of attacks on that strong sentiment in 
Great Britain which felt the cause of the colonies to be 
the old cause of English liberty. At the opening of the 
struggle, this sentiment was intense : officers resigned 



THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. &3 

their commissions rather than serve in America; the 
great cities took open ground in favor of the colonies ; 
and some of the English middle classes wore mourning 
for the dead at Lexington. As the war increased in its 
intensity, this sentiment necessarily decreased ; but, 
even while parliament was supporting the war by votes 
of more than two to one, the ministry was constantly 
hampered by the notorious consciousness that the real 
heart of England was not in it. Even when 25,000 men 
were voted at the king's wish, provision had to be made 
to obtain them from Germany. Privilege and officialism 
were against the colonies ; the popular heart and con- 
science were either ignorant or in favor of them. 

71. But in America everything spoke of war. Howe, 
who had succeeded Gage, passed a very bad winter. His 
men were often short of supplies ; their quarters were 
uncomfortable ; and their efforts to better their position 
were a severe infliction on the inhabitants. Along the 
coast the commanders of British ships acted everywhere 
as if on the borders of an enemy's country ; Gloucester, 
Bristol, Falmouth, and other defenceless towns were can- 
nonaded ; and the flag of the king tended more and more 
to appear that of an enemy. On the first day of the new 
year the distinctive standard of the thirteen united col- 
onies was raised at Washington's headquarters. It intro- 
duced the stripes of the present flag, but retained the 
crosses of St. George and St. Andrew on a blue ground in 
the corner, the whole implying the surviving acknowledg- 
ment of the royal power, with the appearance of a new 
nation. When independence had eliminated the royal 
element, the crosses were replaced (1777) by stars, as at 
present. Congress had been compelled to go so far in 
national action as to threaten reprisals for the threats of 



64 THE UNITED STATES. 

special pimisliment by the ministry. The first step 
towards the ultimate application for admission to the fam- 
ily of nations was really taken in November, 1775, when 
Franklin, Jay, and three other delegates, Avere appointed 
a committee to maintain intercourse with friends of the 
colonies '^ in Great Britain, Ireland, and elsewhere " ; the 
main importance of the appointment was in the last two 
words. The end of the year left independence in the air, 
though hardly spoken of. 

72. Thomas Paine turned the scale (January 9, 1776) 
by the publication of his pamphlet Common Sense. His 
argument was that independence was the only 
consistent line to pursue ; that " it must come 
to that some time or other " ; that it would only be more 
difficult the more it Avas delayed ; and that independence 
was the surest road to union. Written in simple language, 
it was read everywhere ; and the open movement to in- 
dependence dates from its publication. In the meantime 
events were urging Congress on. Washington in March 
seized and fortified Dorchester Heights, to the south of 
Boston and commanding it. Before the British could 
move upon the works, they had been made so strong that 
Evacuation of the garrisou evacuated the place (March 17, 
Boston. 1776), sailing away to Halifax on the fleet. 
For the moment the British had hardly an organized force 
within the thirteen colonies ; Charles Lee had just seized 
New York city and harbor : and the ministry seemed not 
only hostile, but impotent. The spirit of Congress rose 
with success. It had already ordered (November 25, 
1775), on receipt of news of instructions to British war- 
vessels to attack American seaport towns " as in the case 
of actual rebellion," that British war-vessels or transports 
should be open to capture; now (March 23, 1776) it 



THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. Q^ 

declared all British vessels lawful prize. It then went 
on (April 6) to open all American ports to the vessels of 
all other nations than Great Britain, still forbidding the 
slave trade. It had even opened communication with the 
French court, which, using the name of a fictitious firm 
in Paris, was shipping money, arms, and supplies to the 
colonies. All these were acts of an independent power ; 
and colony after colony, changing the colonial into State 
forms of government, was instructing its delegates to vote 
for independence. In May some of- the colonies had 
become too impatient to wait longer, for it was evident 
that the king had finally ranged himself against the new 
American nation. Virginia spoke in most emphatic tones ; 
and one of her delegates, Richard Henry Lee, moved a 
resolution in Congress for independence, seconded by John 
Adams (June 7, 1776). A committee to draw up a dec- 
laration in conformity with the resolution was chosen, 
consisting of Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams, 
Franklin, Eoger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert R. 
Livingston of New York ; but the resolution was not 
adopted until July 2, as follows : — ^^ Resolved that these 
united colonies are and of right ought to be free and 
independent States ; that they are absolved from all alle- 
giance to the British crown ; and that all political con- 
nection between them and the state of Great Britain is 
and ought to be totally dissolved." 

73. Jefferson had come from Virginia with the repu- 
tation of a very ready and able writer ; and the commit- 
tee, by common consent, left the preparation Declaration of 
of the first draft of the Declaration of Inde- independence. 
pendence to him. He wrote it almost at one heat ; and, 
though parts of it were rejected or modified by Congress, 
the whole instrument, as it was adopted by that body 



66 THE UNITED STATES. 

(July 4, 1776), must stand as Jefferson's own work. 
John Adams was its champion on the floor of Congress, 
for Jefferson was not a public speaker, — and the coinci- 
dence of the deaths of these two men, just fifty years 
afterwards (July 4, 1826), was a remarkable one. The 
language of the Declaration, like that of all the Ameri- 
can state-papers of the time, was strong and direct. 
Ignoring parliament, it took every act of oppression 
which had been aimed at the colonies as the act and 
deed of the king; it concluded that "a prince whose 
character is thus marked by every act which may define 
a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people '' ; and 
it announced the independence of the United States in 
the terms of the resolution already stated. The date of 
its adoption is, by the decision of the Supreme Court, 
the date of the legal existence of the United States in 
matters of municipal law. 

74. Meanwhile clouds were gathering about the young 
republic. A British expedition was beaten off from 
Charleston (June 28) ; but two days afterwards a 
stronger force, under Howe, landed on Staten Island, 
just below New York city. The ministry, abandoning 

Attack on the Ncw England, had decided to transfer the 
middle colonies, ^^p ^q ^j^q middle colouics. Here was the 
originally alien element among the colonies (§ 7), though 
the ministry was disappointed in it ; here was the com- 
mercial element, which had sometimes been willing to 
prefer profit to patriotism ; above all, the Hudson gave 
a safe path for British frigates, so that the British forces 
might control at the same time the road into Canada and 
the moat which should cut off New England from the 
other colonies. Most of the reasons which made the 
opening of the Mississippi a severe blow to the Confed- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 67 

eracy in 1863, applied to the capture of New York city 
and the operations in the Hudson river in 1776. 

75. Washington had hurried to New York city as 
soon as Boston had surrendered, but his preparations 
were not far advanced when Howe appeared (June 30). 
He and his brother. Admiral Lord Howe, the commander 
of the fleet, had high hopes of receiving the confidence 
of both parties to the struggle, by reason of their hered- 
itary connection with the crown and the liking of the 
colonies for their elder brother, killed at Ticonderoga ; 
and they brought conciliatory proposals and the consent 
of the ministry to an unofficial exchange of prisoners. 
The country was now committed to independence, and 
in August, Howe began offensive operations. Washing- 
ton's force numbered 27,000, about four-fifths of them 
having never seen action; and about one-third of his 
army had been placed on Long Island. Howe had 
31,000 trained soldiers, largely Hessians ; and he de- 
barked 20,000 of them on Long Island, beating Putnam, 
the American commander there, and driving him into 
Brooklyn (August 27). The British hesitated Battle of Long 
to attack the American works there, so that '^'^"'^• 
Washington was able to draw off the defeated force, 
and the British followed slowly to the New York side 
of the river. Through September and October, Wash- 
ington retreated northwards, fighting stubbornly, until 
he reached the strong defensive positions where the 
mountains begin to make a figure in the landscape north 
of New York city. Here he faced about, and prepared 
to give battle from behind fortifications. Again Howe 
hesitated, and then turned back to occupy New York. 

76. Howe was cut off from the water-way to Canada 
by Washington's fortification of the highlands, but his 



68 THE UNITED STATES. ' 

lieutenant, Cornwallis, secured a lodgement by surprise on 
the other side of the Hudson, and thus drew Washington 
across the river to oppose him. Forced to retreat through 
Washington's Ncw Jcrsej, pursucd by the British, Wash- 
retreat, ington at least used up the month of Decem- 
ber in the retreat. But affairs were in a desperate 
plight. His army had been driven across the Delaware ; 
the British held all New Jersey, and were only waiting 
for the river to freeze over to " catch Washington and 
end the war '' ; Philadelphia was in a panic, and Con- 
gress had taken refuge in Baltimore, leaving Washington 
with almost dictatorial powers; hosts of half-hearted 
people were taking British protections and returning to 
their allegiance ; and the time was one which ^' tried 
men^s souls." Washington's soul was proof against all 
tests ; and in the midst of his discouragements he had 
already planned that which was to be the turning-point 
of the war. The advance post of the British was one of 
Hessians, under Eahl, at Trenton, on the Delaware. 
Battles of Tren- Sciziug all the boats on the river, and choos- 
*°" ing the night of Christmas, on the probability 
that the Hessians would be drunk, he crossed the river, 
assaulted the town with the bayonet, and captured the 
garrison. Taking his prisoners to Philadelphia, he re- 
crossed the river on the last day of the year, and reoc- 
cupied Trenton. Cornwallis brought almost all his 
available forces towards that place; and Washington's 
diminishing army was in greater danger than before. 
Leaving his camp-fires burning, he abandoned 
his position by night, swept around the sleep- 
ing British forces, met, fought, and captured at Prince- 
ton (January 3, 1777) a detachment on its march to 
Trenton, and threatened the British base of supplies at 



THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 69 

New Brunswick. It was only a threat ; but it served its 
purpose of drawing Cornwallis off from Philadelphia. 

77. New Jersey is crossed from south-west to north- 
east by a spur of the Alleghanies. Thus far operations 
had been confined to the flat country to the south; 
Washington now swept on to the northern or mountain- 
ous part, and the day after Princeton fixed his headquar- 
ters at Morristown, where they really remained almost 
all through the rest of the war. He was aided by the 
unwillingness of the British to attack entrenchments. 
His long line across New Jersey was everywhere strong ; 
the British could now reach Philadelphia only by pass- 
ing in front of his line and risking a flank attack ; and 
they at once drew in their outposts to New Brunswick, 
With the exception of the occupation of Newport by the 
British, and attacks on minor outlying places, as Dan- 
bury, there was a short breathing space. 

78. Kalb, Kosciusko, Conway, and other foreign officers 
were already serving in the American army; Pulaski, 
Steuben, and others were soon to come. Some of the 
minor foreign acquisitions of this sort were selfish, 
conceited, and troublesome ; the most unselfish and de- 
voted was the young Marquis de la Fayette, who came 
this year with a shipload of supplies as his gift to 
the republic. Franklin made his appearance 

at the French court (December 7, 1776) as 
one of the American envoys, and soon took the lead in 
negotiations. Shrewd, sensible, far-sighted, and prompt, 
never missing or misusing an opportunity, he soon suc- 
ceeded in committing the French Government, in all but 
the name, as an ally of the United States ; and, though 
his success with other European courts was small, he 
opened the way for the general commercial treaties which 



70 THE UNITED STATES. 

followed the war. His unofficial influence was a more 
important factor in his work. Carefully maintaining 
the character of a plain American burgher, he seemed to 
the French the veritable man of nature for whom they 
had been longing. The pithy sense and homely wit 
which had given force to his Poor Bichard's Almanac 
had impressed even his unemotional countrymen strongly ; 
his new audience took them as almost inspired. He, and 
his country with him, became the fashion ; and it became 
easier for the Government to cover its own supplies to 
the insurgents by an appearance of embarrassment in 
dealing with the enthusiasm of its subjects. The foreign 
aid, however, did the Americans a real harm. Congress, 
relying upon it, grew more and more into the character 
of a mere agent of the States for issuing paper and bor- 
rowing money ; and the taxing function, which should 
have been forced upon it from the beginning, fell more 
positively into the hands of the States. As the national 
character of Congress dwindled, the State jealousies and 
ambitions of its delegates increased; little cliques had 
their favorite officers — Gates, Charles Lee, Conway, 
or some other soldier of fortune; and Washington, ne- 
glected and harassed by turns, must have found it diffi- 
cult to face Howe with half his number of men, foil the 
various competitors for his own position, and maintain 
his invariably respectful tone towards Congress. 

79. In July, 1777, Burgoyne, with an army of British, 
Germans, and Indians, attempted the Hudson river route 
Burgoyne's ex- ffom the uorth, and forced his way nearly to 
pedition. Albany. The utter defeat of a detachment 
at Bennington (August 16) by the farmers of Vermont 
and New Hampshire under Stark, the atrocities of the 
Indians before they deserted Burgoyne's standard, and 



THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 71 

the end of the harvest brought abundant reinforcements 
to Gates, whom Congress had put in command. He 
gained the battle of Bemis Heights (October 7), and ten 
days afterwards forced Burgoyne to surrender near Sara- 
toga. The news of this success brought to Saratoga. 
Franklin (February 6, 1778) the desire of his jreaty with 
heart in a treaty of alliancej offensive and de- i^rance. 
fensive, between the United States and France, and this 
was followed in the next month by war between Great 
Britain and France and an ineffectual proposal for recon- 
ciliation from Great Britain to the United States, cover- 
ing colonial representation in parliament and everything 
short of independence. 

80. Meantime Howe had taken the water-route to 
Philadelphia, by way of the ocean and Chesapeake Bay, 
and had captured the city (September 25, capture of phii- 
1777) ; but Washington had at least made his ^deiphia. 
army capable of fighting two battles, those of Chad's 
Ford on the Brandy wine (September 11) and German- 
town in the outskirts of Philadelphia (October 4), both 
stubbornly contested. Taking up winter-quarters at Valley 
Forge, about twenty miles from Philadelphia, 
he watched Howe vigilantly, and struggled 
manfully with the responsibilities of supreme command, 
which the fugitive Congress had again left to him, with 
the misery and almost despair of his own men, and with 
the final intrigues of those who now wished to supersede 
him by the appointment of Gates. In June, 1778, the 
news of the treaty with France, and of the departure of 
a French fleet and army for America, compelled Clinton, 
who had succeeded Howe, to set out for New York, in 
order to reunite his two main armies. Washington broke 
camp at once, followed him across New Jersey, and over- 



72 THE UNITED STATES. 

took the rear at Monmouth, or Freehold (June 29). An 

indecisive battle enabled the British to gain New York 

Battle of city J Washiugtou formed his line from Mor- 

Monmouth. rigtowu arouud the north of the city, so as to 
be able to interpose between Clinton and Philadelphia or 
New England ; and these positions were maintained 
until the Yorktown campaign began in 1781. Beyond 
skirmishes, there were no more important events in the 
north, except some unsuccessful attempts to recover New- 
port with French assistance, the capture of Stony Point 
by Wayne (July 15, 1779), and the treason of the Amer- 
ican commander of West Point, Benedict Arnold, with 
the execution of the British adjutant-general, Major 
John Andre, whom the Americans had captured within 
their lines while he was carrying on the negotiations 
(September, 1780). 

81. Midsummer, 1778, marks the beginning of the end. 
33,000 men, the high-water mark of the British army in 
the United States, had maintained a footing at but two 
places. New York city and Newport; the ministry, in a 
war which had no real popular momentum, found Ger- 
man mercenaries an expensive resource ; and the Germans 
were very apt to desert in America. An extraordinary 
number of leading men in England, while they would 
not hamper the nation in its struggle, made no scruple of 
expressing their practical neutrality or their high regard 
for various American leaders. France was now in the 
war, and Spain and Holland were soon to be the allies of 
France. The difficulties of supplying the British army 
were now aggravated by the presence of French fleets in 
American waters. English commerce had been deci- 
mated by American privateers ; and Franklin was gather- 
ing vessels in France, in one of which (the ''Eichard") 



THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 73 

Paul Jones was to fight with the " Serapis " one of the 
most desperate naval battles on record (September 23, 
1779). Perhaps hopeless of success in the Northern and 
Middle States, the ministry decided to begin ^^^^^ ^^ 
operations in the south, where it was believed the southern 
that the slave population would be a fatal 
source of weakness to the Americans. 

82. Late in 1778 a British expedition from New York 
captured Savannah, and rapidly took possession of the 
thinly populated State of Georgia. An attempt to retake 
Savannah in the following year cost the Americans the 
life of Pulaski. Evacuating Newport, and leaving only 
troops enough to hold New York city, Clinton sailed 
southward and captured Charleston (May 12, capture of 
1780). Thence his forces swept over South Charleston. 
Carolina until they had reduced it to a submission 
broken by continual outbursts of partisan warfare under 
Sumter, Marion, and other leaders. This work finished, 
Clinton returned to New York, leaving Conwallis in com- 
mand in the south. As soon as the summer heats had 
passed away Gates entered the State from the north 
with a militia army, and was badly beaten at Battle 
Camden (August 16) by an inferior British ofCannden. 
force. Even North Carolina now needed defence, and 
the work was assigned to Greene, one of the best of the 
American officers developed by the war. The com- 
mander of his light troops, Morgan, met his British rival, 
Tarleton, at the Cowpens (January 17), and 
inflicted upon the latter the first defeat he °^p®"^' 
had met in the south. This event brought Cornwallis up 
to the pursuit of the victor. Morgan and Greene re- 
treated all the way across North Carolina, followed by 
Cornwallis, and then, having raised fresh troops in Vir- 



74 THE UNITED STATES. 

ginia, they turned and gave battle at Guilford Court 
House (March 15, 1781). Greene was beaten, as was 
Guilford Court Hsually the case with him, but he inflicted so 
House. heavy a loss in return that Cornwallis retired 
to the coast at Wilmington to repair damages. Greene, 
energetic as well as cautious, passed on to the south, and 
gave battle to Eawdon, whom Cornwallis had left in com- 
mand in South Carolina, at Hobkirk's Hill 
(April 25), and was beaten again. But Eaw- 
don's loss was so severe that he drew in his lines toward 
Charleston. Greene followed, and at Eutaw Springs 
(September 8) fought the last pitched battle 
prmgs. ^^ ^^^ south. He was beaten again, but Raw- 
don again fell back, and thereafter did all that man 
could do in holding the two cities of Charleston and 
Savannah. Greene had won no battle, but he had saved 
the south. 

83. Arnold, now a general in the British service 
(§ 80), had been sent, early in the year, to make a lodge- 
ment in Virginia. It seems to have been believed by the 
British authorities that the three southernmost States 
were then secure, and that Virginia could be carved out 
next. La Fayette was sent to oppose Arnold, but the 

Cor>twaiiis in latter was soon relieved, and in June, Corn- 
virginia. ^allls Mmsclf entered the State. He had not 
been willing to serve with Arnold. Directed to select 
a suitable position for a permanent post on the Chesa- 
peake, he had chosen Yorktown, where, with the troops 
already in Virginia, he fortified his army. The general 
ground was that of McClellan's campaign of 1862 (§ 285), 
and Grant's of 1864-65 (§ 296). 

84. Washington, reinforced by a lately arrived force 
of 6000 excellent French troops (July, 1780), under Ro- 



THE -STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 75 

chambeau, was still watching Clinton at New York. 
The news that De Grasse's French fleet, on its way to 
the American coast, would enter the Chesapeake, where 
Cornwallis had left himself open to the chances of such 
an event, led Washington to conceive the campaign 
which captured Cornwallis and ended the war. He 
began elaborate preparations for an attack on New York, 
so that Clinton actually called upon Cornwallis for aid. 
Moving down the Hudson, he kept Clinton in ignorance 
of any movement to the south as long as possible, and 
then changed the line of march to one through New 
Jersey. The allied armies passed through Philadelphia, 
were hurried down the Chesapeake, and drove Cornwallis 
within his entrenchments at Yorktown. De 
Grasse had arrived August 30, had defeated 
the British fleet, and was master of the Chesapeake 
waters. After three weeks' siege, Cornwallis, having ex- 
hausted a soldier's resources, surrendered his army of 
8000 men (October 19, 1781). 

S5. The country at large had really been at peace 
for a long time. Everywhere, except in the immediate 
neighborhood of the British forces, the people were work- 
ing almost with forgetfulness that they had ever been 
English colonists ; and, where the enemy had to be 
reckoned with, they were looked upon much as the early 
settlers looked on bears or Indians, as an unpleasant 
but inevitable item in the debit side of their accounts. 
Their legislatures were making their laws ; their gov- 
ernors, or "presidents," were the representatives whom 
their States acknowledged ; nothing but an American 
court had the power to touch a particle of the judicial 
interests of the American people ; the American flag 
was recognized on the ocean ; independence was a fact. 



76 THE UNITED STATES. 

and the ministry received from the English people so 
emphatic a call to acknowledge it that it yielded so far 
as to propose a defensive war. The House of Commons 
(March 4, 1782) voted to regard as enemies to the king 
and country all who should advise the further prosecu- 
tion of the war ; the Eockingham ministry succeeded to 
power, to be followed shortly by the Shelburne minis- 
try ; and Rodney's victory over De Grass e gave the new 
ministries very much the same cover for an unsuccessful 
peace as Jackson's victory at New Orleans afforded the 
United States in 1815 (§ 181). Franklin, John Adams, 
and Jay, the American negotiators, concluded the pre- 
liminary treaty of peace, by which Great Britain acknowl- 
edged the independence of the United States (November 
30, 1782) ; hostilities ceased ; and the definite 
treaty of peace was concluded (September 3, 
1783). A number of American loyalists (usually called 
Tories) accompanied the departing armies. 

86. In the winter of 1778-79 George Eogers Clark, a 
Kentucky leader, acting under the authority of the State 
of Virginia, had led a force of backwoodsmen 
into the country north of the Ohio river, 
captured the British posts in it, and made the soil Amer- 
ican up to the latitude of Detroit. The treaty of peace 
acknowledged the conquest, and even more than this. 
It settled the northern boundary of the United States, 
so far as the longitude of the Mississippi river, nearly as 
it now runs ; the Mississippi as the western boundary 
down to 31° N. lat., thence east on that line to the 
present northern boundary of Florida, and east on that 
to the Atlantic. Great Britain restored the Floridas to 
Spain, so that the new nation had Great Britain as a 
neighbor on the north, and Spain on the south and west. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 7 J 

Some disposition had been shown to exclude the Amer- 
icans from the fishing ground off Newfoundland, but it 
was abandoned. The United States by the treaty entered 
the family of nations with recognized boundaries, and all 
the territory within these boundaries could be recognized 
by other nations only as the property of the United 
States. But, so far as internal arrangements were con- 
cerned, a great question remained to be settled. There 
were thirteen organized States, covering but a part of 
this territory ; a part of them claimed to be sole proprie- 
tors of the western territory outside of the present State 
limits ; and it remained to be seen whether they would 
make good their claim, or the other States would compel 
them to divide, or the new national power would compel 
as clear an internal as an international recognition of 
its claim (§ 89). 

87. The American army was now disbanded, its officers 
receiving a grudging recognition of their claims and the 
privates hardly anything. Poverty was to blame for 
much of this, and the popular suspicion of military 
power for the rest. Washington's influence was strong 
enough to keep the dissatisfied army from any open 
revolt, though that step was seriously proposed. The 
organization of the hereditary order of the Cincinnati by 
the officers brought about a more emphatic 
expression of public dislike, and the hered- 
itary feature was abandoned. But, wherever the officers 
and men went, they carried a personal disgust with the 
existing frame of government which could not but pro- 
duce its effect in time. Their miseries had been largely 
due to it. The politicians who controlled the State legis- 
latures had managed to seize the reins of government and 
reduce Congress, the only body with pretensions to a 



78 THE UNITED STATES. 

national character, to the position of a purely advisory 
body. The soldiery knew instinctively that the lack of 
power to feed them and clothe them, the payment of their 
scanty wages in paper worth two per cent, of its face value, 
were due to the impotence of Congress and the too great 
power of the States, that the nation presented the " awful 
spectacle," as Hamilton called it, of "a nation without a 
national government " ; and the commonest toast in the 
army was " Here's a hoop to the barrel " — a stronger 
national government to bind the States together. 

The struggle for the establishment of this national 
government is the next step in the development of the 
United States, but to reach it naturally it will be nec- 
essary to go back into the midst of the struggle for 
independence. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 79 



V. 

THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 

1777-89. 

88. The fact that the Continental Congress was really 
a revolutionary body, not limited in its powers by any 
fundamental law imposed by the underlying popular 
sovereignty, but answering most closely to the British 
parliament, has already been noted (§ 64). This state of 
affairs was repugnant to all the instincts and prejudices 
of the American people, and of the delegates who repre- 
sented them. Just at the time of the Declaration of 
Independence Congress set about preparing a Articles of 
"form of confederation," which should ex- Confederation. 
press exactly the relative powers of the State and na- 
tional governments. Its work was finished November 
15, 1777, and recommended to the States for adoption. 
Unluckily, before the work had been finished, the State 
legislatures had succeeded in establishing their power to 
appoint and recall at pleasure the delegates to Congress, 
so that Congress had come to be the mere creature of 
the State legislatures. The " Articles of Confederation," 
adopted in 1777, were thus calculated for the meridian 
of the State legislatures which were to pass upon them. 
The new government was to be merely " a firm league of 
friendship " between sovereign States, which were to re- 
tain every power not "expressly" delegated to Congress; 
there was to be but one house of Congress, in which each 



80 THE UNITED STATES. 

State was to have an equal vote, with no national execu- 
tive or judiciary ; and Congress, while keeping the power 
to borrow money, was to have no power to levy taxes, or 
to provide in any way for payment of the money bor- 
rowed — only to make recommendations to the States or 
requisitions on the States, which they pledged their pub- 
lic faith to obey. The States were forbidden to make 
treaties, war, or peace, to grant titles of nobility, to 
keep vessels of war or soldiers, or to lay imposts which 
should conflict with treaties already proposed to France 
or Spain. Important measures required the votes of 
nine of the thirteen States, and amendments the votes of 
all. Congress had hardly more than an advisory power 
at the best. It had no power to prevent or punish 
offences against its own laws, or even to perform effec- 
tively the duties enjoined upon it by the Articles of 
Confederation. It alone could declare war, but it had no 
power to compel the enlistment, arming, or support of 
an army. It alone could fix the needed amount of 
revenue, but the taxes could only be collected by the 
States at their own pleasure. It alone could decide dis- 
putes between the States, but it had no power to compel 
either disputant to respect or obey its decisions. It 
alone could make treaties with foreign nations, but it 
had no power to prevent individual States from violating 
them. Even commerce, foreign and domestic, was to be 
regulated entirely by the States, and it was not long 
before State selfishness began to show itself in the regu- 
lation of duties on imports. In everything the States 
were to be sovereign, and their creature, the Federal 
Government, was to have only strength enough to bind 
the States into nominal unity, and only life enough to 
assure it of its own practical impotence. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 81 

89. Most of the States signed the Articles at once; 
New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland held out against 
ratifying them for from two to four years, jhe western 
The secret of their resistance was in the territory. 
claims to the western territory already mentioned (§§ 34, 
86). The three recalcitrant States had always had fixed 
western boundaries, and had no legal claim to a share in 
the western territory ; the Articles, while providing for 
the decision of disputes between individual States, were 
careful to provide also that " no State shall be deprived 
of territory for the benefit of the United States " ; and 
this meant that those States whose charters carried them 
to the Pacific Ocean, while admitting the national au- 
thority to limit their claims by the Mississippi river, 
were to divide up the western territory among them. 
New Jersey and Delaware gave up the struggle in 1778 
and 1779 ; but Maryland would not and did not yield, 
until her claims were satisfied. 

90. Dr. H. B. Adams has shown that the whole ques- 
tion of real nationality for the United States was bound 
up in this western territory ; that even a i^s relations to 
" league government " could not continue ^^^ ^"'°"' 
long to govern a great and growing territory like this 
without developing into a real national government, 
even without a change of strict law ; and that the Mary- 
land leaders were working under a complete conscious- 
ness of these facts. It is creditable, however, to the 
change which the struggle for union had wrought in the 
people, that it was not until very late in this struggle 
that Virginia, the most omnivorous western claimant, 
proposed to have the Articles go into effect without 
Maryland, and still more creditable that her proposal 
hardly received notice from the other States. They 



82 THE UNITED STATES. 

were already conscious that the thirteen were really 
one. 

91. The solution of the difficulty was found in 1780. 
The western boundary of the State of New York had 

New York's always been very much in the air. Her main 
claim. claim to her present extensive territory lay in 
the assertions that the western part had once belonged to 
the Six Nations of Indians, and that the Dutch conquer- 
ing the Six Nations, the English conquering the Dutch, 
and New York conquering the English, had succeeded 
to these rights. But the Six Nations had exercised an 
undefined suzerainty over all the Indian tribes from 
Tennessee to Michilimackinac, covering all the territory 
in dispute. New York proposed, if Congress would 
confirm her present western boundary, to transfer to 
Congress her western claims by conquest, superior to any 
mere charter claims ; and Congress approved the offer as 
" expressly calculated to accelerate the federal alliance." 
On March 1, 1781, the New York delegates formally 
completed the deed of transfer to the United States ; on 
the same day the Maryland delegates signed the Arti- 
cles ; and by this action of the last State the Articles of 
Confederation came into force as the first attempt to 
frame a national government. 

92. The long struggle had given time for careful con- 
sideration of the Articles. Maryland's persistent criti- 
cism had prepared men to find defects in them. Con- 
ventions of New England States, pamphlets, and private 
correspondence had found flaws in the new plan of 
government; but a public trial of it was a necessary 
preliminary to getting rid of it. The efforts of the 
individual States to maintain the war, the disposition 
of each State to magnify its own share in the result, 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 83 

the popular jealousy of a superior power, transferred 
now from parliament to the central government, and 
inflamed by the politicians who saw their quickest road 
to dignity in the State governments, were enough to 
ensure the Articles some lease of life. A real national 
government had to be extorted through the "grinding 
necessities of a reluctant people.'' 

93. Congress and its committees had already begun to 
declare that it was impossible to carry on a government 
efficiently under the Articles. Its expostula- Territorial ces- 
tions were to be continued for several years ^'°"^- 
before they were heard. In the meantime it did not 
neglect the great subject which concerned the essence of 
nationality — the western territory. Virginia had made 
a first offer to cede her claims, but it was not accepted. 
A committee of Congress now made a report (1782) 
maintaining the validity of the rights which New York 
had transferred to Congress ; and in the next year 
Virginia made an acceptable offer. Her deed was 
accepted (March 1, 1784) ; the other claimant States 
followed; and Congress, which was not authorized by 
the Articles to hold or govern territory, became the 
sovereign of a tract of some 430,000 square miles, nearly 
equal to the areas of France, Spain, and Portugal, com- 
bined, covering all the country between the Atlantic tier 
of States and the Mississippi river, from the British 
possessions nearly to the Gulf of Mexico. 

94. In this territory Congress had now on its hands 
the same question of colonial government in which the 
British parliament had so signally failed. Territorial 
The manner in which Congress dealt with it government. 
has made the United States the country that it is. The 
leading feature of this plan was the erection, as rapidly 



84 THE UNITED STATES. 

as possible, of States, similar in powers to the original 
States. The power of Congress over the territories was 
to be theoretically absolute, but it was to be exerted in 
encouraging the development of thorough self-govern- 
ment, and in granting it as fast as the settlers should 
become capable of exercising it. Copied in succeeding 
Acts for the organization of Territories, and still con- 
The Ordinance trolUug the Spirit of such Acts, the Ordinance 
of 1787. of 1787 (j^iy 13^ 1737) ig the foundation of 

almost everything which makes the modern American 
system peculiar. 

95. The preliminary plan of Congress was reported by 
a committee (April 23, 1784) of which Jefferson was 
chairman. It provided for the erection of seventeen 
States, north and south of the Ohio, with some odd 
names, such as Sylvania, Assenisipia, Metropotamia, 
Polypotamia, and Pelisipia. These States were forever 
to be a part of the United States, and to have republican 
governments, and the Ordinance creating them was to be 
a compact between the Federal Government and each 
State, unalterable unless by mutual consent. "After the 
year 1800 there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary 
servitude in any of the said States, other than in the 
punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been 
duly convicted." This provision, which represented Jef- 
ferson's feeling on the subject, was lost for want of seven 
States in its favor. 

96. The final plan of 1787 was reported by a committee 
of which Nathan Dane, of Massachusetts, was chairman. 
The prohibition of slavery was made perpetual, and a 
fugitive slave clause was added (§ 124). The Ordinance 
covered only the territory north of the Ohio, and provided 
for not less than three nor more than five States. Ohio, 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 85 

Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin have been the 
resultant States. The inhabitants were to be secured in 
the equal division of real and personal property of intes- 
tates to the next of kin in equal degree. At first Con- 
gress was to appoint the governor, secretary, judges, and 
militia generals, and the governor and judges were to 
make laws subject to the veto of Congress. When the 
population reached 5000 the inhabitants were to have an 
assembly of their own, to consist of the governor, a legis- 
lative council of five, selected by Congress from ten 
nominations by the lower housC; and a lower house of 
representatives of one delegate for every 500 inhabitants. 
This assembly was to choose a delegate to sit, but not to 
vote, in Congress, and was to make laws not repugnant to 
"the articles of fundamental compact," which were as 
follows : the new States or Territories were to maintain 
freedom of worship, the benefits of the writ of habeas 
corpus, trial by jury, proportionate representation, bail, 
moderate fines and punishments, and the preservation of 
liberty, property, and private contracts ; they were to 
encourage public education and keep faith with the 
Indians ; they were to remain forever a part of the United 
States ; and they were not to interfere with the disposal 
of the soil by the United States, or to tax the lands of 
the United States, or to tax any citizen of the United 
States for the use of the Mississippi or St. Lawrence 
rivers. These articles were to be unalterable unless by 
mutual consent of a State and the United States. The 
transformation of the Territory, with its quite limited 
government, into a State, with all the powers of an origi- 
nal State, was promised by Congress as soon as the popu- 
lation should reach 60,000. 

97. The Constitution, which was adopted almost imme- 



86 THE UNITED STATES. 

diately afterwards, provided merely that " Congress shall 
have power to dispose of, and make all needful rules and 
regulations respecting, the territory or other property 
belonging to the United States," and that '' new States 
may be admitted by the Congress into the Union." 
Oijinions have varied as to the force of the Ordinance of 
1787. The southern school of writers have naturally 
been inclined to consider it ultra vires and void ; and they 
adduce the fact that the new Congress under the Consti- 
tution thought it necessary to re-enact the Ordinance. 
The opposite school have inclined to hold the Ordinance 
as still in force. Even as to the territorial provision of 
the Constitution, opinions have varied. The Dred Scott 
decision held that it applied only to the territory then in 
possession of the United States, and that territory subse- 
quently acquired, by conquest or purchase, was not to be 
governed by Congress with absolute power, but subject 
to constitutional limitations. 

• 98. In the interval of the settlement of the territorial 
question, the affairs of the " league of friendship " known 
as the United States had been going from bad to worse, 
culminating in 1786. The public debt amounted in 1783 
to about f 42,000,000, of which $8,000,000 was owed 
abroad — in Holland, France, and Spain. Congress had 
no power to levy taxes for the payment of interest or 
principal ; it could only make requisitions on the States. 
In the four years ending in 1786 requisitions had been 
^.^ , . made for $10,000,000, and the receipts from 

Difficulties TT 7 7 :i L 

of the confeder- them had amouutcd to but one-fourth of what 

^^'°"' had been called for. Even the interest on 

the debt was falling into arrears, and the first instalment 

'of the principal fell due in 1787. To pay this, and 

subsequent annual instalments of $1,000,000, was quite 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 87 

impossible. Robert Morris, the financier of the revolu- 
tion, resigned in 1783, ^^ rather than be the minister of 
injustice," hoping thus to force upon the States the 
necessity of granting taxing powers to Congress. Wash- 
ington, on retiring from the command-in-chief, wrote a 
circular letter to the governors of all the States, urging 
the necessity of granting to Congress some power to 
provide a national revenue. Congress (April 18, 1783) 
appealed to the States for power to levy specific duties on 
certain enumerated articles, and five per cent, on others. 
It was believed that with these duties and the requisi- 
tions, which were now to be met by internal taxation, 
$2,500,000 per annum could be raised. Some of the 
States ratified the proposal ; others ratified it with 
modifications ; others rejected it, or changed their votes ; 
and it never received the necessary ratification of all the 
States. The obedience to the requisitions grew more lax. 
Some of the States paid them; others pleaded poverty, 
and allowed more or less of them to run into arrears ; 
others offered to pay in their own dei)reciated paper cur- 
rency; and others indignantly refused to pay in any 
currency until the delinquent States should pay all their 
obligations. In 1786 a committee of Congress reported 
that any further reliance on requisitions would be " dis- 
honorable to the understandings of those who entertain 
such confidence." 

99. In the States the case was even worse. Some of 
them had been seduced into issuing paper currency in 
such profusion that they were almost bank- Difficulties 
rupt. Great Britain, in the treaty of peace, °^ ^^® sts.\Bs. 
had recognized the independence of the individual States, 
naming them in order ; and her Government followed 
the same system in all its intercourse with its late col- 



88 THE UNITED STATES. 

onies. Its restrictive system was maintained, and the 
States, vying with each other for commerce, could adopt 
no system of counteracting measures. Every possible 
burden was thus shifted to American commerce; and 
Congress could do nothing, for, though it asked for the 
power to regulate commerce for fifteen years, the States 
refused it. The decisions of the various State courts be- 
gan to conflict, and there was no power to reconcile them 
or to prevent the consequences of the divergence. Sev- 
eral States, towards the end of this period, began to 
prepare or adopt systems of protection of domestic pro- 
ductions or manufactures, aimed at preventing competi- 
tion by neighboring States. The Tennessee settlers were 
in insurrection against the authority of North Carolina ; 
and the Kentucky settlers were apparently disposed to 
cut loose from Virginia if not from the United States. 
Poverty, with the rigid execution of ]3rocess for debt, drove 
the farmers of western Massachusetts into an insurrec- 
tion which the State had much difficulty in suppressing ; 
and Congress was so incompetent to aid Massachusetts 
that it was driven to the expedient of imagining an In- 
dian war in that direction, in order to transfer troops 
Difficulties thither. Congress itself was in danger of dis- 
of Congress, appcaraucc from the scene. The necessity 
for the votes of nine of the thirteen States for the pas- 
sage of important measures made the absence of a State's 
delegation quite as effective as a negative vote. In order 
to save the expense of a delegation, the States began to 
neglect the election of them, unless they had some object 
to obtain by their attendance. It was necessary for Con- 
gress to make repeated and urgent appeals in order to ob- 
tain a quorum for the ratification of the treaty of peace 
with Great Britain. In 1784 Congress even broke up in 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 89 

disgust, and the French minister reported to his Govern- 
ment, " There is now in America no general govern- 
ment — neither Congress nor President, nor head of any 
one administrative department." Everywhere there were 
symptoms of a dissolution of the Union. 

100. Congress was evidently incompetent to frame a 
new plan of national government ; its members were too 
dependent on their States, and would be recalled if they 
took part in framing anything stronger than the Arti- 
cles. The idea of a convention of the States, Proposals for a 
independent of Congress, was in the minds convention. 
and mouths of many ; Thomas Paine had suggested it as 
long ago as his Common Sense pamphlet : " Let a conti- 
nental conference be held, to frame a continental charter, 
drawing the line of business and jurisdiction between 
members of Congress and members of assembly." To a 
people as fond of law and the forms of law as the Amer- 
icans, there was a difficulty in the way. The Articles 
had provided that no change should be made in them 
but by the assent of every State legislature. If the 
work of such a convention was to be subject to this rule, 
its success would be no greater than that of Congress ; if 
its plan was to be put into force on the ratification of 
less than the whole number of States, the step would be 
more or less revolutionary. In the end, the latter course 
was taken, though not until every other expedient had 
failed ; but the act of taking it showed the underlying 
consciousness that union, independence, and nationality 
were now inextricably complicated, and that the thirteen 
had become one in some senses. 

101. The country drifted into a convention by a 
roundabout way. The navigation of Chesapeake Bay 
needed regulation ; and the States of Maryland and Vir- 



90 THE UNITED STATES. 

ginia, having plenary power in the matter, appointed 
delegates to arrange such rules. The delegates met 
(1785) at Washington's house, Mount Vernon ; and 
Maryland, in adopting their report, proposed a meeting 
of commissioners from all the States to frame commer- 
cial regulations for the whole. Virginia acceded at once. 
Convention of ^.ud named Annapolis, in Maryland, as the 
'^^^- place. The convention met (1786), but only 
five States were represented, and their delegates ad- 
journed, after recommending another convention at 
Philadelphia, in May, 1787. 

102. Congress had failed in its last resort — a pro- 
posal that the States should grant it the impost power 

Convention of alouc ; Ncw York's veto had put an end to 
''^^^- this last hope. Confessing its helplessness. 
Congress approved the call for a second convention; 
twelve of the States (all but Ehode Island) chose dele- 
gates ; and the convention met at Philadelphia (May 14, 
1787), with an abler body of men than had been seen in 
Congress since the first two Continental Congresses. 
Among others, Virginia sent Washington, Madison, Ed- 
mund Randolph, George Mason, and George Wythe ; 
Pennsylvania, Franklin, Eobert and Gouverneur Mor- 
ris, and James Wilson ; Massachusetts, Eufus King, 
Gerry, and Strong ; Connecticut, William S. Johnson, 
Sherman, and Ellsworth ; ]N"ew York, Hamilton ; New 
Jersey, Paterson; and South Carolina, the two Pinck- 
neys and Rutledge. With hardly an exception the 
fifty-five delegates were clear-headed, moderate men, 
with positive views of their own, and firm purpose, 
but with a willingness to compromise. 

103. Washington was chosen to preside, and the con- 
vention began the formation of a new Constitution, instead 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 91 

of proposing changes in the old one. Two parties were 
formed at once. The Virginia delegates offered jhe Virginia 
a plan, proposing a Congress of two houses, p'^"- 
having power to legislate on national subjects, and to 
compel the States to fulfil their obligations. This is 
often spoken of as a " national plan," but very improp- 
erly. It was a ''large-State'' plan, proposed by those 
States which had or hoped for a large population. It 
meant to base representation in both houses on popula- 
tion, so that the large States could control both of them, 
and it left the appointment of the President or other 
executive and the Federal judges to Congress, — so that 
.the whole administration of the new government would 
fall under large-State control. On behalf of jhe New jersey 
the " small States " Paterson of New Jersey p'^"- 
brought in another plan. It continued the old Confed- 
eration, with its single house and equal State vote, but 
added the power to regulate commerce and raise a reve- 
nue, and to compel the States to obey requisitions. The 
State representation was fortunate. New Hampshire's 
delegates did not attend until after those of New York 
(then classed as a small State) had retired from the con- 
vention in anger at its evident drift toward the " large- 
State" plan. The large States had a general majority of 
six to five, but the constant dropping off of one or more 
votes, on minor features, from their side to that of the 
small States prevented the hasty adoption of any radical 
measures. Nevertheless, the final collision could not be 
evaded ; the basis of the two plans was in the question of 
one or two houses, of equal or proportionate State votes, 
of large-State supremacy or of State equality. In July 
the large States began to show a dispositioii to force their 



92 • THE UNITED STATES. 

plan through, and the small States began to threaten 
a concerted withdrawal from the convention. 

104. The Connecticut delegates, from their first appear- 
ance in the convention, had favored a compromise. They 

The compro- ^^^d bccu trained under the New England sys- 
'"'^®- tern, in which the assemblies were made up 
of two houses, one representing the people of the whole 
State, according to population, and the other giving an 
equal representation to the towns. They proposed that 
the new Congress should be made up of two houses, one 
representing the States in proportion to their population, 
the other giving an equal vote to each State. At a dead- 
lock, the convention referred the proposition to a com- 
mittee, and it reported in favor of the Connecticut 
compromise. Connecticut had been voting in the large- 
State list, and the votes of her delegates could not be 
spared from their slender majority ; now another of the 
large States, North Carolina, came over to Connecticut's 
proposal, and it was adopted. Thus the first great strug- 
gle of the convention resulted in a compromise, which 
took shape in the peculiar feature of the Constitution, 
the senate. 

105. The little States were still anxious, in every new 
question, to throw as much power as possible into the 
hands of their special representative, the senate; and 

The work of the th^t body thus obtained its power to act as 
convention. QiTi cxccutive couucil as a restraint on the Pres- 
ident in appointments and treaties. This was the only 
survival of the first alignment of parties ; but new divis- 
ions arose on almost every proposal introduced. The 
election of the President was given at various times to 
Congress and to electors chosen by the State legislatures ; 
and the final mode of choice, by electors chosen by the 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 93 

States, was settled only two weeks before the end of the 
convention, the office of Vice-President coming in with 
it. The opponents and supporters of the slave trade 
compromised by agreeing not to prohibit it for twenty 
years. Another compromise included three-fifths of the 
slaves in enumerating population for representation. 
This was the provision which gave the slave-holders 
abnormal power as the number of slaves increased ; for 
a district in the " black belt " of the south, while three- 
fifths of its slaves were enumerated, really gave repre- 
sentation to its few whites only. 

106. Any explanation of the system introduced by the 
Constitution must start with the historical fact that while 
the national Government was practically suspended, from 
1776 until 1789, the only power to which political privi- 
leges had been given by the people was the States, and 
that the State legislatures were, when the convention 
met, politically omnipotent, with the exception of the 
few limitations imposed on them by the early State con- 
stitutions, which were not at all so searching or severe 
as those of more recent years. The general rule, then, 
is that the Federal Government has only the powers 
granted to it by the Federal Constitution, while the State 
has all governmental powers not forbidden to it by the 
State or the Federal Constitution. But the phrase defin- 
ing the Federal Government's powers is no longer " ex- 
pressly granted," as in the Articles of Confederation, but 
merely "granted," so that powers necessary to the exe- 
cution of granted powers belong to the Federal Govern- 
ment, even though not directly named in the Constitution. 
This question of the interpretation, or " construction," of 
the Constitution is at the bottom of real national politics 
in the United States : the minimizing parties have sought 



94 THE UNITED STATES. 

to hold the Federal Government to a strict construction 
of granted powers, while their opponents have sought to 
widen those powers by a broad construction of them. 
The strict-construction parties, when they have come 
into power, have regularly adopted the practice of their 
opponents, so that construction has pretty steadily broad- 
ened; the power to "regulate commerce between the 
States " is now interpreted so as to include the power of 
Congress to regulate the fares and contracts of railways 
engaged in inter-State commerce (§ 327), which would 
have been deemed preposterous in 1787. 

107. Popular sovereignty, then, is the oasis of the 
American system. But it does not, as does the English 
system, choose its legislative body and leave unlimited 
powers to it. It makes its " Constitution " the permanent 
TheConstitii- medium of its orders or prohibitions to all 
^'°"- branches of the Federal Government and to 
many branches of the State Governments : they must do 
what the Constitution directs and leave undone what it 
forbids. The people, therefore, are continually laying 
their commands on their Governments ; and they have 
instituted a system of Federal courts to ensure obedience 
to their commands. An English court must obey the 
Act of parliament ; the American court is bound and 
sworn to obey the Constitution first and the Act of Con- 
gress or of the State legislature only so far as it is 
warranted by the Constitution. But the American court 
does not deal directly with the Act in question ; it deals 
with individuals who have a suit before it. One of these 
individuals relies on an Act of Congress or of a State 
legislature ; the Act thus comes before the court for ex- 
amination ; and it supports the Act or disregards it as 
"unconstitutional," or in violation of the Constitution. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 95 

If the court is one of high, rank or reputation, or one to 
which a decision may be appealed, as the United States 
Supreme Court, other courts follow the precedent, and 
the law falls to the ground. The court does not come 
into direct conflict with the legislative body ; and, where 
a decision would be apt to produce such a conflict, the 
practice has been for the court to regard the matter as a 
" political question " and refuse to consider it. 

108. The preamble states that " we, the people of the 
United States," establish and ordain the Constitution. 
Events have shown that it was the people 

of the whole United States that established ^ ^'^^"^ 
the Constitution, but the people of 1787 seem to have 
inclined to the belief that it was the people of each 
State for itself. This belief was never changed in the 
south ; and in 1861 the people of that section believed 
that the ordinances of secession were merely a repeal of 
the enacting clause by the power which had passed it, 
the people of the State. 

109. The original Constitution was in seven articles. 
The first related to the organization and powers of 
Congress, which consists of a senate and The house of 
house of representatives. Eepresentatives representatives. 
are to be inhabitants of the State for which they are 
chosen, to be twenty-five years old at least, and are to 
serve two years. Each house of representatives thus 
lasts for two years, and this period is usually known as 
" a Congress " ; the fiftieth Congress expired March 4, 
1889, having completed the first century of the Con- 
stitution. Representatives are assigned to the States in 
proportion to population, and this fact forced the pro- 
vision for a decennial census, the first appearance of 
such a provision in modern national history. The first 



96 THE UMTED STATES. 

census was taken in 1790. Apportionment of repre- 
sentatives from 1883 to 1893 is governed by the census 
of 1880 ; by Act of Congress the number 154,325 is the 
divisor into a State's population which fixes the number 
of the State's representatives, the whole number of 
representatives being 325/ with eight delegates from the 
Territories, having seats and the right to debate, but not 
to vote. The house elects its speaker and other officers, 
and has the power of impeachment. 

110. The legislature of each State elects two senators, 
to serve for six years; and no State can ever be 
deprived of its equal share of representation 
except by its own consent. The senators are 
divided into three classes, the term of one class expiring 
every two years. Six years are therefore necessary to 
completely change the composition of the senate, and it 
is considered a continuous body. Senators are to be at 
least thirty years old, and must be inhabitants of the 
States from which they are chosen and citizens of the 
United States for at least nine years previous to their 
election. The Vice-President presides over the senate, 
having no vote unless in case of an equal division. But 
the legislative provision (continuing until 1887) that the 
death or disability of the President and Vice-President 
devolved the office of President on the presiding officer 
pro tempore of the senate made that officer one of great 
possible importance, and the Vice-President regularly 
retired just before the end of a session, so that a pro 
tempore officer might be selected (§ 117). 

1 The admission of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and 
Washington (see note, page 58), will increase the number of represen- 
tatives to 330, with one delegate from each of the four remaining Terri- 
tories, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Idaho. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 97 

111. All ofB.cers of the United States are open to im- 
peachment by the house of representatives, the impeach- 
ment to be tried by the senate, and the 

penalty to be no more than removal and dis- 
qualification to serve further under the United States. 
When the President is tried, the chief-justice of the 
Supreme Court presides. 

112. The members of both houses are privileged from 
arrest and from being questioned elsewhere for words 
spoken in debate. Each house passes on the 

election of its own members ; but an Act of 
Congress may control the Acts of the State legislature 
as to time, place, and manner of elections, except as to 
the place of choosing senators, in which the legislature 
remains supreme. Congress has exercised the power by 
passing a general election law. The two houses cannot 
adjourn to another place or for more than three days, 
unless by common consent. Their members are paid by 
the United States, and must not be office-holders or 
receive any office created or increased in pay during their 
term of service in Congress. 

113. When a bill passes both houses it goes to the 
President. If he signs, it becomes a law. If he holds 
it without signing for ten days (Sundays 
excepted) it becomes law, unless the final ^ ° ^°^^^' 
adjournment of Congress comes in the ten days. All 
bills passed in the last ten days of a Congress are there- 

^ fore at the mercy of the President ; he can prevent them 
from becoming laws by simply retaining them. If the 
President decides to veto a bill he returns it, with a 
statement of his objections, to the house in which it 
originated. It can then only become law by the vote of 
two-thirds of both houses. 



98 THE UNITED STATES. 

114. The powers of Congress are fully stated. The 
first is to "lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and 
Powers of Con- cxciscs, [iu Order] to pay the de^. s and pro- 
gress. yi(^g fQp ^i^Q common defence and general 
welfare of the United States." The words in brackets 
are not in the original, but they are included in con- 
struction by all respectable authorities, as essential to 
its meaning; any other construction would give Con- 
gress absolute poAver over whatever it thought to be 
for " the common defence or general welfare." Duties, 
etc., are to be uniform throughout the United States. 
Other powers are : to borrow money ; to regulate foreign 
and domestic commerce ; to make rules for naturaliza- 
tion, and bankruptcy laws ; to coin money, regulate the 
value of foreign coins, and fix the standard of weights 
and measures; to punish the counterfeiting of Federal 
securities and current coin ; to establish post-offices and 
post-roads; to establish patent and copyright systems; 
to establish courts inferior to the Supreme Court ; to 
punish offences on the high seas or against international 
law; to declare war, grant letters of marque and 
reprisal, and make rules for captures ; to raise and sup- 
port armies, no appropriation to be for more than two 
years ; to provide and maintain a navy ; to make articles 
of war ; to use the militia of the States in executing 
Federal laws, suppressing insurrections, and repelling 
invasions; to provide for organizing, arming, and disci- 
plining this militia, leaving the States to appoint the 
officers, and carry out the system; to establish a 
national capital or Federal district (the District of 
Columbia, containing the city of Washington), and to 
exercise exclusive powers of legislation over it, and over 
sites for forts, dockyards, etc., bought by permission of 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 99 

the States ; and, finally, " to make all laws which, shall 
be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the 
foregoing powers, -and all other powers vested by this 
Constitution in the Government of the United States, or 
in any department or office thereof." This last power 
has been the subject of most debate. It was urged that, 
unless an Act of Congress was strictly " necessary " for 
the execution of one of the granted powers, it was 
invalid. The Supreme Court has held that the Act need 
not be " absolutely necessary," or even " very necessary," 
— that it is enougli if it is " necessary." As the 
decision of the necessity is with the legislative body, the 
word opens a wide sweep for construction; but it has 
always furnished a barricade which the opponents of a 
bill have often found very strong. 

115. The real sovereignty which made the Constitu- 
tion shows itself in a double series of prohibitions — on 
the Federal Government and on the States. „ 

Powers forbidden 

The Federal Government shall not suspend to the Federal 
the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus ex- G"^^^'^"^^"^- 
cept in case of rebellion or invasion, when the public 
safety requires it. Since the Civil War the Supreme 
Court has decided that the writ itself can never be sus- 
pended while the courts are open, that the Federal Gov- 
ernment may suspend the privilege of the writ as to classes 
of persons directly interested in the war, but that the 
writ is still to issue and the court to decide whether the 
applicant comes within the excepted classes or not. Con- 
gress must not pass any bill of attainder or ex post facto 
law, tax exports, give commercial preference to the ports 
of one State over those of another, lay direct taxes except 
in proportion to census population, or grant any title of 
nobility. Money is to be taken from the treasury only 



100 THE UNITED STATES. 

in consequence of appropriations made by law. And no 
person in the service of the United States may accept 
any gift or title from a foreign power without consent of 
Congress. 

116. The States are absolutely forbidden to make trea- 
ties of any kind, to grant letters of marque and reprisal, 
Powers forbidden to colu moucy, to emit bills of credit, to make 

to the states, anything but silver a legal tender, to grant 
any title of nobility, to pass any bill of attainder, ex post 
facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts. 
It follows from the last clause that States cannot pass 
bankruptcy laws. The States are forbidden, except by 
consent of Congress, to lay any duties on imports or ex- 
ports, except inspection charges, to be paid into the Fed- 
eral treasury ; to lay any tonnage duties ; to keep troops 
(a word which does not cover militia) or ships in peace; 
to make any agreement with another State or with a for- 
eign power ; or to engage iii war unless actually invaded. 

117. The President is to be a native citizen, at least 
thirty-five years old, and at least fourteen years a resi- 

The President ^eut witMu thc United States. He is paid by 
and his powers. ^]^q United Statcs ; and his salary is not to 
be increased or diminished by Congress during his term: 
the Act must apply to the successors of the President 
who signs the Act. He is sworn to execute his office 
faithfully, and to " preserve, protect, and defend the Con- 
stitution of the United States." In case of his death, 
resignation, or inability (by impeachment or otherwise) 
the Vice-President succeeds him ; and, in case of the ina- 
bility of both, the members of the cabinet succeed in a 
prescribed order, according to the Presidential Succession 
Act of 1886. The President has the veto ftower already 
described, sends messages to Congress on the state of the 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 101 

Union or on special subjects, convenes either house or 
both on extraordinary occasions, receives foreign envoys, 
commissions officers of the United States, and oversees 
the execution of the laws passed by Congress. He 
makes treaties ; but no treaty is valid unless passed by 
the senate by a two-thirds vote of those present. He ap- 
points ministers and consuls, judges, and all other officers 
whose appointment Congress had not vested in other 
officers ; but presidential appointments must be confirmed 
by the senate, though the President may make temporary 
appointments during the recess of the senate, to hold 
until the end of their next session. He is commander-in- 
chief of the army and navy, and has power of pardon or 
reprieve for offences against Federal laws, except in case 
of impeachment. And he may call upon heads of depart- 
ments for an opinion in writing on any subject relating 
to his department. 

118. The last clause has evolved the "cabinet," a 
term not known in the Constitution. When Congress 
has by law organized a department, its lead- 
ing officer is called its secretary. There are 

now (1887) seven departments — those oi state, of the 
treasury, of war, of the navy, of the post-office, of the 
interior, and of justice ; and departments of agriculture 
and of labor have been proposed.^ The secretaries are 
selected by the President and are confirmed by the sen- 
ate, but are not responsible to any one but the President. 
Nor is he bound by their individual opinions, or even by 
a unanimous opinion from one of their periodical meet- 
ings. They are his advisers only. 

119. The people have no direct voice in the choice of 
President and Vice-President : they choose electors, each 

1 A department of agriculture was organized in February, 1889. 



102 THE UNITED STATES. 

State having as many electors as it has senators and 
representatives together; and the electors choose the 
President and Vice-President, meeting at their State capi- 
The electoral tals for that purposc, and sending separate 
system. certificates of their choice of President and of 
Vice-President to the presiding oflB.cer of the senate at 
Washington. The electors are to be chosen in such 
manner as the legislature of each State shall direct ; and 
this plenary power of the legislatures was the source of 
the unhappy disputed election of 1876-77. By Acts of 
Congress, the electors are to be chosen on the Tuesday 
after the first Monday of November ; they meet in their 
States and vote on the first Wednesday of December ; 
and Congress meets on the second Wednesday of Febru- 
ary to witness the counting of the electoral votes. The 
electors are legally State officers ; and the action of their 
States in regard to them was evidently intended to be 
final. Until 1887 Congress refused to provide for nec- 
essary proof of the State's action, and claimed the power 
to provide from time to time for emergencies. Such 
emergencies were constantly occurring ; and Congress, 
which was meant to be merely a witness of the count by 
the presiding officer of the senate, had seized, before 1876, 
a general supervisory power over the electors and their 
votes. This illegitimate function of Congress broke down 
in 1876-77, for several Southern States sent different sets 
of certificates ; the two houses of Congress were con- 
trolled by opposite parties, and could agree on nothing ; 
and an extra-constitutional machine, the " electoral com- 
mission," was improvised to tide over the difficulty. 
Now provision is made by the Electoral Count Act of 
1887, for the State's certification of its votes ; and the 
certificate which comes in legal form is not to be rejected 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 103 

but by a vote of both houses. If there is no majority 
of electoral votes for any person for Vice-President, the 
senate, by a majority of its members, chooses from the 
two names highest on the list. If there is no majority 
for President, the house of representatives chooses one 
from the three names highest on the list, each State 
having one vote. 

120. The electors were meant to exercise a perfect 
freedom of choice, and there are instances in early years 
of electors voting for personal friends of the powers of the 
opposite party. It was originally provided electors. 
that each elector was to name two persons, without 
specifying which was to be President or Vice-President. 
When the votes were counted, the highest name on the 
list, if it had a majority of all the votes, obtained the 
presidency, and the next highest became Vice-President. 
It has been said that the convention cut out the office of 
President according to the measure of George Washing- 
ton, and there was no difficulty while he served : each 
elector cast one of his votes for Washington, and he was 
chosen unanimously; the struggle was for the second 
office. When he went out of office in 1796 the parties 
began to name candidates in advance for the two offices ; 
the electors began to feel bound to vote for their party 
candidates; and the individuality of the electors dis- 
appeared at once. In the election of 1800 the electors 
of the successful party voted together like a well-drilled 
army, and the result was that the two candidates of the 
successful party had an equal vote. The defeated party 
controlled the house of representatives, and their efforts to 
choose Burr President instead of Jefferson ex- jhe 12th 
asperated the Democrats and sealed the fate amendment. 
of the old system. An amendment to the Constitution 



104 THE UNITED STATES. 

was adopted in 1804, changing tlie method of the electors 
in voting, so that each should vote separately for the 
two offices and thus prevent any tie vote from this cause. 

121. The Constitution provides for one Supreme Court, 
having original jurisdiction in cases affecting foreign 

The Federal miuistcrs and cousuls, and those to which a 
'^o"'^^- State shall be a party, and appellate jurisdic- 
tion from such subordinate courts as Congress should 
from time to time establish. All judges were to hold 
office during good behavior (§ 237), and their salaries 
were not to be diminished during their continuance in 
office. Criminal trials were to be by jury, except in 
impeachments, and were to be held within the State in 
which the offence had been committed, or in places 
assigned by law for the trial of offences committed out- 
side the jurisdiction of any State. The whole jurisdic- 
tion of Federal courts, covering both the original and the 
appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, was clearly 
stated. Federal courts were to deal with all cases in 
law or equity arising under the Constitution or the laws 
or treaties made under it ; with all cases affecting public 
ministers and consuls, or admiralty or maritime law; 
with suits by or against the United States ; and with 
suits by one State against another, by a State against 
citizens of another State, by a citizen of one State against 
a citizen of another, by a citizen of a State against citi- 
zens of his own State when the question was one of a 
grant of land from different States, by a State or its 
citizens against foreigners, or by a foreigner against an 
American. As the section first stood, it was open to 
the construction of giving the power to the citizen of 
one State to sue another State, and the Supreme Court 
so construed it in 1793-94. The States at once took the 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 105 

alarm ; and the lltli amendment, forbidding suit against 
a State under this section except by another State, was 
ratified in 1798. 

122. As soon as the new Government was organized 
in 1789, a Judiciary Act was passed, organizing the whole 
system of inferior Federal courts. Subse- organization of 
quent development has not changed the essen- the judiciary. 
tial nature of this first Act. The Supreme Court now 
consists of a chief-justice and eight associate justices ; 
there are nine circuit courts, each consisting of a Supreme 
Court justice and a circuit judge ; and fifty-six district 
courts, each with a district judge. Each circuit com- 
prises several States ; and the Supreme Court justices, in 
addition to their circuit work, meet in bank annually at 
Washington. The districts cover each a State or a part 
of a State. Appeal lies from the district to the circuit 
court when the matter involved is of a value greater than 
$500, and from the circuit to the Supreme Court when 
$5000 or more is involved. There are also Territorial 
courts ; but these are under the absolute power of Con- 
gress over the Territories, and are not covered by the 
constitutional provisions as to courts. Consular courts, 
held abroad, fall under the treaty power. 

123. The Constitution's leading difference from the 
Confederation is that it gives the national Government 
power over individuals. The Federal courts ^s power over 

l are the principal agent in securing this essen- individuals. 
tial power ; without them, the Constitution might easily 
have been as dismal a failure as the Confederation. It 
has also been a most important agent in securing to the 
national Government its supremacy over the States. 
From this point of view the most important provision of 
the Constitution is the grant of jurisdiction to Federal 



106 THE UNITED STATES. 

courts in cases involving the construction of the Consti- 
tution or of laws or treaties made under it. The 25th 
section of the Judiciary Act permitted any Supreme 
Court justice to grant a writ of error to a State court in 
a case in which the constitutionality of a Federal law or 
treaty had been denied, or in which a State law objected 
to as in violation of the Federal Constitution had been 
maintained. In such cases, the defeated party had the 
right to carry the "Federal question" to the Federal 
courts. It was not until 1816 that the Federal courts 
undertook to exercise this power ; it raised a storm of 
opposition, but it was maintained, and has made the Con- 
stitution what it professed to be — " the supreme law of 
- the land." As a subsidiary feature in the 
judiciary system, treason was restricted to the 
act of levying war against the United States, or of adher- 
ing to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort ; the 
evidence of it to confession in open court, or to the testi- 
mony of two witnesses to an overt act ; and any forfeiture 
in the punishment to a life effect only. The States, 
however, have always asserted their power to punish for 
treason against them individually. It has never been 
fully maintained in practice ; but the theory had its 
effect in the secession period. 

124. The States were bound to give credit to the pub- 
lic records of other States, to accord citizenship to the 

Fugitive crimi- citizcus of othcr Statcs, to return criminals 
nais and slaves, fleciug f rom otlicr Statcs, and to return " per- 
sons held to service or labor " under the laws of another 
State. This last was the " fugitive slave " provision 
of the Constitution, which became so important after 
1850 (§ 228). 

125. The Federal Government was to guarantee a 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 107 

republican form of government to each of the States, and 
to protect each of them against invasion, or, Guarantee 
on application of the legislature or governor, ^'^^^®- 
against domestic violence. The "guarantee clause" really 
substituted State rights under the guarantee of the Fed- 
eral Government for the notion of State sovereignty 
under the guarantee of the State itself. A still stronger 
case of this was in the 5th article of the Constitution, 
stating the manner of amendment. The convention of 
1787, it must be borne in mind, was working under a sys- 
tem of government which provided expressly that it Avas 
not to be altered in the least unless by consent of all the 
States. The Constitution provided that it was to go into 
force, so far as the ratifying States were concerned, as 
soon as nine of the thirteen States should ratify it, and 
that any future amendment, when passed by two-thirds 
of both houses and ratified by the legislatures or conven- 
tions of three-fourths of the States, should become a part 
of the Constitution. By application of the legislatures 
of two-thirds of the States, a new convention, like that 
which framed the Constitution, might take the place of 
the two houses of Congress in proposing amendments. A 
system u^der which a State submits its whole future 
destiny to an unlimited power of decision in three- 
fourths of its associate States can hardly be called one 
of State sovereignty. 

126. The debts of the Confederation, and its engage- 
ments, were made binding on the new Government ; 
the Constitution, and laws and treaties to be supreme law of 
made under it, were declared to be " the su- ^^"^ '^"^• 
preme law of the land " ; judges of State courts were to 
be bound thereby, "anything in the Constitution or laws 
of any State to the contrary notwithstanding " ; all the 



108 THE umTED STATES. 

legislative, executive, and judicial officers of the United 
States and of each and every State were to be bound by 
oath or affirmation to support the Constitution of the 
United States ; but religious tests were forbidden. 

127. Ten amendments were adopted so soon after the 
ratification of the Constitution that they may fairly be 

The first ten cousidcred a part of the original instrument. 

amendments. Q^j^gy ^g^c duc to a general desire that a "bill 
of rights " of some kind should be added to it ; but they 
did not alter any of the articles of the Constitution. 
They forbade any establishment of religion by Congress, 
or any abridgment of freedom of worship, of the press, 
or of speech, or of the popular right to assemble and peti- 
tion the Government for redress of grievances ; the bil- 
leting of soldiers ; unreasonable searches or seizures, or 
general warrants ; trials for infamous crimes except 
through a grand jury's action; subjecting a person for 
the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or 
limb ; compelling him to witness against himself in crim- 
inal cases ; the taking of life, liberty, or property with- 
out due process of law or without compensation for prop- 
erty ; and the demand of excessive bail, or the imposition 
of excessive fines or of cruel or unusual punishments. 
They asserted the right of the people to keep and bear 
arms, to a jury trial from the vicinage in criminal cases 
or in cases involving more than twenty dollars, to a copy 
of the indictment, to the testimony against the prisoner, 
to compulsory process on his behalf, and to counsel for 
him. And they stated expressly the general principle 
already given, that the Federal Government is restricted 
to granted powers, while those not mentioned are reserved 
"to the States respectively or to the people." 

128. The omission of the word "thereof after the 



TH£ STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 109 

clause last mentioned seems significant. The system of 
the United States is almost the only national 
system, in active and successful operation, as ^ ^o^^'^e'e" y- 
to which the exact location of the sovereignty is still a 
mooted question. The contention of the Calhoun school 
— that the separate States were sovereign before and 
after the adoption of the Constitution, that each State 
adopted it by its own power, maintained it by its own 
power, and could put an end to it by its own power, that 
the Union was purely voluntary, and that the whole peo- 
ple, or the people of all the other States, had no right to 
maintain or ejiforce the Union against any State — has 
been ended by the Civil War. But that did not decide 
the location of the sovereignty. The prevalent opinion 
is still that first formulated by Madison : that the States 
were sovereign before 1789 ; that they then gave up a 
part of their sovereignty to the Federal Government; 
that the Union and the Constitution were the work of the 
States, not of the whole people ; and that reserved powers 
are reserved to the people of the States, not to the whole 
people. The use of this bald phrase "reserved to the 
people,'' not to the people of the several States, in the 
10th amendment, seems to argue an underlying conscious- 
ness, even in 1789, that the whole people of the United 
States was already a political power quite distinct from 
the States, or the people of the States ; and the tendency 
of later opinion is in this direction. It must be admitted 
that the whole people has never acted in a single capac- 
ity ; but the restriction to State lines seems to be a self- 
imposed limitation by the national people, which it might 
remove, as in 1789, if an emergency should make it nec- 
essary. The Civil War amendments are considered below 
(§§ 305-309). 



110 THE UNITED STATES. 

129. By whatever sovereignty the Constitution was 
framed and imposed, it was meant only as a scheme in 
Details of the Outline, to be filled up afterwards, and from 
system. ^\^^q ^q time, by legislation. The idea is 
most plainly carried out in the Federal justiciary: the 
Constitution only directs that there shall be a Supreme 
Court, and marks out the general jurisdiction of all the 
courts, leaving Congress, under the restriction of the 
President's veto power, to build up the system of courts 
which shall best carry out the design of the Constitution. 
But the same idea is visible in every department, and it 
has carried the Constitution safely through a century 
which has radically altered every other civilized govern- 
ment. It has combined elasticity with the limitations 
necessary to make democratic government successful 
over a vast territory, having infinitely diverse interests, 
and needing, more than almost anything else, positive 
opportunities for sober second thought by the people. 
A sudden revolution of popular thought or feeling is 
enough to change the house of representatives from top 
to bottom ; it must continue for several years before it 
can make a radical change in the senate, and for years 
longer before it can carry this change through the judi- 
ciary, which holds for life ; and all these changes must 
take place before the full effects upon the laws or Consti- 
tution are accomplished. But the minor changes which 
are essential to an accommodation with the growth and 
development of a great nation are reached in the mean- 
time easily and naturally in the course of legislation, to 
which the skeleton outline of the Constitution lends itself 
kindly. The members of the convention of 1787 showed 
their wisdom most plainly in not trying to do too much ; 
if they had done more they would have done far less. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. Ill 

130. The convention adjourned ITtli September, 1787, 
having adopted tlie Constitution. Its last step was a res- 
olution that the Constitution be sent to the submission to 
Congress of the Confederation, with the rec- Congress. 
ommendation that it be submitted to conventions elected 
by the people of each State for ratification or rejection; 
that, if nine States should ratify it. Congress should 
appoint days for the popular election of electors, for the 
choice of President and Vice-President by the electors, 
and for the meeting of senators and representatives to be 
chosen under the new plan of government ; and that then 
the new Congress and President should, " without delay, 
proceed to execute this Constitution." Congress, having 
received the report of the convention, resolved that it be 
sent to the several legislatures, to be submitted to con- 
ventions ; and this was all the approval the Constitution 
ever received from Congress. Both Congress and the 
convention were careful not to open the dangerous ques- 
tion. How was a government which was not to be changed 
but by the legislatures of all the States to be entirely 
supplanted by a different system through the appToval of 
conventions in three-fourths of them ? They left such 
questions to be opened, if at all, in the less public forum 
of the legislatures. 

131. Before the end of the year Delaware, Pennsyl- 
vania, and New Jersey had ratified ; and Georgia, Con- 
necticut, and Massachusetts followed durine^ ^ ^ ,. ^ 

' ^ Federalists 

the first two months of 1788. Thus far the and Antifeder- 
only strong opposition had been in Massachu- 
setts, a " large State." In it the struggle began between 
Federalists and Antifederalists, between the friends and 
the opponents of the Constitution, with its introduction of 
a strong Federal power ; and it raged in the conventions, 



112 THE UNITED STATES. 

legislatures, newspapers, and pamphlets. The best of 
the last was The Federalist, written mainly by Hamilton, 
with the assistance of Madison and Jay, explaining the 
new Constitution and defending it. As it was written 
before the Constitution went into force, it speaks much 
for the ability of its writers that it has passed into a 
standard text-book of American constitutional law. 

132. The seventh and eighth States — Maryland and 
South Carolina — ratified in April and May, 1788 ; and, 

while the conventions of Virginia and New 
York were still wrangling over the great ques- 
tion, the ninth State, New Hampshire, ratified, and the 
Constitution passed out of theory into fact. This left the 
other States in an unpleasant position. The Antifeder- 
alists of the Virginia and New York conventions offered 
conditional ratifications of all sorts ; but the Federalists 
stubbornly refused to consider them, and at last, by very 
slender majorities, these two States ratified. North 
Carolina refused to ratify the Constitution, and Khode 
Island refused even to consider it (§ 145). Congress 
named the first Wednesday of January, 1789, as the day 
for the choice of electors, the first Wednesday in Febru- 
ary for the choice of President and Vice-President, and 
the first Wednesday in March for the inaugu- 
ration of the new Government at New York 
city. The last date fell on the 4th of March, which 
has been the limit of each President's term since that 
time. 

133. When the votes of the electors were counted be- 
fore Congress, it was found that Washington had been 

Fall of the uuanimously elected President, and that John 
Confederation. Adams, Standing next on the list, was Vice- 
President. Long before the inauguration the Congress 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 113 

of the Confederation had expired of mere inanition ; its 
attendance simply ran down until (October 21, 1788) its 
record ceased, and the United States got on without any- 
national Government for nearly six months. The strug- 
gle for nationality had been successful, and the old order 
faded out of existence. 

134. The first census (1790) followed so closely upon 
the inauguration of the Constitution that the country 
may fairly be said to have had a population of nearly four 
millions in 1789. Something over half a million of these 
were slaves of African birth or blood. Slavery of this 
sort had taken root in all the colonies, its slavery in the 
original establishment being everywhere by United states, 
custom, not by law. When the custom had been suffi- 
ciently established statutes came in to regulate a relation 
already existing. Indented servants came only for a 
term of years, and then were free. Slaves were not vol- 
untary immigrants : they had come as chattels, not as per- 
sons, and had no standing in law, and the law fastened 
their condition on their children. But it is not true, as 
the Dred Scott decision held long afterwards (§ 249), 
that the belief that slaves were chattels simply, things 
not persons, held good at the time of the adoption of the 
Constitution. Times had changed somewhat. The pecu- 
liar language of the Constitution itself, describing slaves 
as " persons held to service or labor, under the laws of 
any State," puts the general feeling exactly : they were 
persons from whom the laws of some of the States with- 
held personal rights for the time. In accordance with 
this feeling most of the Northern States were on the high 
road towards abolition of slavjery. Vermont Abolition in the 
had never allowed it. In Massachusetts it "°^*^- 
was swept out by a summary court decision that it was 



114 THE UNITED STATES. 

irreconcilable with the new State constitution. Other 
States soon began systems of gradual abolition, which 
finally extinguished slavery north of Virginia, but so grad- 
ually that there were still eighteen apprentices for life in 
New Jersey in 1860, the last remnants of the former slave 
system. In the new States north of the Ohio slavery was 
prohibited by the Ordinance of 1787 (§ 96), and the pro- 
hibition was maintained in spite of many attempts to get 
rid of it and introduce slavery. 

135. The sentiment of thinking men in the south was 
Feeling in the cxactly the sauic, or in some cases more bitter 

south. from their personal entanglement with the 
system. Jefferson's language as to slavery is irrecon- 
cilable with the chattel notion ; no abolitionist agitator 
ever used warmer language than he as to the evils of 
slavery, and the expression, " our brethren," used by him 
of the slaves, is conclusive. Washington, Mason, and 
other Southern men were as warm against slavery as 
Jefferson, and societies for the abolition of slavery were 
very common in the south. No thinking man could face 
with equanimity the future problem of holding a sepa- 
rate race of millions in slavery. Like most slave laws, 
the laws of the Southern States were harsh : rights were 
almost absolutely withheld from the slave, and punish- 
ments of the severest kind were legal ; but the execution 
of the system was milder than its legal possibilities 
might lead one to imagine. The country was as yet so 
completely agricultural, and agriculture felt so few of the 
effects of large production and foreign commerce, that 
southern slavery kept all the patriarchal features possi- 
ble to such a system. 

136. Indeed, the whole country was almost exclusively 
agricultural, and, in spite of every effort to encourage 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 115 

manufactures by State bounties and colonial protection, 
they formed the meagrest element in the national pro- 
duction. Connecticut, which now teems with . . , 

' _ _ Agriculture, 

manufactures, was just beginning the produc- commerce, and 
tion of tinware and clocks ; E-hode Island and 
Massachusetts were just beginning to work in cotton 
from models of jennies and Arkwright machinery sur- 
reptitiously obtained from England after several failures 
and in evasion of penal Acts of parliament ; and other 
States, beyond local manufactures of paper, glass, and 
iron, were almost entirely agricultural, or were engaged 
in industries directly dependent on agriculture. Com- 
merce was dependent on agriculture for exports ; and 
manufactured imports were enough to drown out every 

I other form of industry. 

137. There were but four cities in the United States 
having a population of more than 10,000 — Philadel- 
phia (42,000), New York (33,000), Boston changes sir.ce 
(18,000), and Baltimore (13,000). The pop- '^^o. 
ulation of the city of Kew York and its dependencies is 
now more than half as large as that of the whole United 
States in 1789 ; the State of New York or of Pennsyl- 
vania has now more inhabitants than the United States 
in 1790 ; and the new States of Ohio and Illinois, which 

; had hardly any white inhabitants in 1789, do not fall 
far behind. Imports have swollen from $23,000,000 to 
f 650,000,000, exports from $20,000,000 to $700,000,000, 
since 1790. The revenues of the new Government in 1790 
were $4,000,000 ; they have now grown to $300,000,000 
or more. The expenditures of the Government, exclud- 

; ing interest on the public debt, were but $1,000,000 in 
1790, where now they are $200,000,000 or upwards per an- 

I num. It is not easy for the modern American to realize 



116 THE UNITED STATES. 

the poverty and weakness of his country at the inaugurar 
tion of the new system of government, however he may 
realize the simplicity of the daily life of its people. 
Even the few large cities were but larger collections of 
the wooden houses, with few comforts, which composed 
'the villages; the only advantage of their inhabitants 
over those of the villages was in the closer proximity to 
their neighbors ; and but a little over three per cent, of 
the population had this advantage, against about twenty- 
five per cent, in 1880. 

138. Outside the cities communication was slow. One 

stage a week was enough for the connection between the 

great cities ; and communication elsewhere 

Communication. - , , . , rm 

depended on private conveyance. Ine great 
rivers by which the continent is penetrated in every 
direction were with difficulty ascended by sailing vessels 
or boats ; and the real measure of communication was 
thus the daily speed of a man or a horse on roads bad 
beyond present conception. The western set- 
tlements were just beginning to make the 
question more serious. Enterprising land companies 
were the moving force which had impelled the passage 
of the Ordinance of 1787 ; and the first column of their 
settlers was pouring into Ohio and forming connection 
with their predecessors in Kentucky and Tennessee. 
Marietta and Cincinnati (at first a Government fort, 
and named after the society of the Cincinnati) had been 
founded. But the intending settlers were obliged to 
make the journey down the Ohio river from Pittsburgh 
in bullet-proof flat-boats, for protection against the Indi- 
ans, and the return trip depended on the use of oars. For 
more than twenty years these flat-boats were the chief 
means of river commerce in the west ; and, in the longer 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 117 

trips, as to New Orleans, the boats were generally broken 
up at the end and sold for lumber, the crew making the 
trip home on foot or on horseback. John Fitch and 
others were already experimenting on what was soon to 
be the steamboat (§ 167) j but the statesman of 1789, 
looking at the task of keeping under one Government a 
country of such distances, with such difficulties of com- 
munication, may be pardoned for having felt anxiety as 
to the future. To almost all thinking men of the time 
the Constitution was an experiment, and the unity of the 
new nation a subject for very serious doubt. 

139. The comparative isolation of the people every- 
where, the lack of books, the poverty of the schools and 
newspapers, were all influences which worked 
strongly against any pronounced literary de- 
velopment. Poems, essays, and paintings were feeble 
imitations of European models ; history was annalistic, 
if anything ; and the drama hardly existed. In two 
points the Americans were strong, and had done good 
work. Such men as Jonathan Edwards had excelled in 
various departments of theology, and American preaching 
had reached a high degree of quality and influence ; and, 
in the line of politics, the American state-papers rank 
among the very best of their kind. Having a very clear 
perception of their political purposes, and having been 
restricted in study and reading to the great masters of 
pure and vigorous English, and particularly to the Eng- 
lish translators of the Bible, the American leaders came 
to their work with an English style which could hardly 
have been improved. The writings of Franklin, Wash- 
ington, the Adamses, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Jay, 
and others show the secret of their strength in every 
page. Much the same reasons, with the influences of 



118 THE UNITED STATES. 

democracy, brought oratory, as represented by Patrick 
Henry, Fisher Ames, John Randolph, and others, to a 
point not very far below the mark afterwards reached by 
Daniel Webster. The effect of these facts on the subse- 
quent development of the country is not often estimated 
at its full value. All through an immigration of every 
language and dialect under heaven the English language 
has been protected in its supremacy by the necessity of 
going back to the " fathers of the republic " for the first, 
and often the complete, statement of principles in every 
great political struggle, social problem, or lawsuit. 

140. The cession of the "north-west territory" by 
Virginia and Kew York had been followed up by similar 
Limits of set- ccssious by Massachusctts (1785), Connecticut 
tiement. (1786), and South Carolina (1787). North 
Carolina did not cede Tennessee until late in 1789, nor 
Georgia her western claims until 1802. Settlement in 
all these regions was hardly advanced beyond what it 
had been at the outbreak of the revolution. The centres 
of western settlement, in Tennessee and Kentucky, had 
merely become more firmly established, and a new one, 
in Ohio, had just been begun. The whole western limits 
of settlement of the old thirteen States had moved much 
nearer their present boundaries ; and the acquisition, of 
the western title, with the liberal policy of organization 
and government which had been begun, was to have its 
first clear effects during the first decade of the new Gov- 
ernment. Almost the only obstacle to its earlier success 
had been the doubts as to the attitude which the Spanish 
authorities, at New Orleans and Madrid, would take 
The Mississippi towards the new settlements. They had 
river. already asserted a claim that the Mississippi 
was an exclusively Spanish stream from its mouth up to 



THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 119 

the Yazoo, and that no American boat should be allowed 
to sail on it. To the western settler the Alleghanies and 
bad roads were enough to cut him off from any other way 
to a market than down the Mississippi ; and it was not 
easy to restrain him from a forcible defiance of the 
Spanish claim. The Northern States were willing to al- 
low the Spanish claim in return for a commercial treaty ; 
the Southern States and the western settlers protested 
angrily ; and once more the spectre of dissolution appeared, 
not to be laid again until the new Government had made 
a treaty with Spain in 1795, securing common navigation 
of the Mississipi^i. 

141. All contemporary authorities agree that a marked 
change had come over the people since 1775, and few of 
them seem to think the change one for the sociaicondi- 
better. Many attribute it to the looseness of ^'°"^- 
manners and morals introduced by the French and British 
soldiers; others to the general effects of war; a few, 
Tories all, to the demoralizing effects of rebellion. The 
successful establishment of nationality would be enough 
to explain most of it ; and if we remember that the new 
nation had secured its title to a vast western territory, of 
unknown but rich capacities, which it was now moving 
to reduce to possession by emigration, it would seem far 
more strange if the social conditions had not been some- 
what disturbed. 



120 THE UNITED STATES. 



VI. 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCEACY. 

1789-1801. 

142. All the tendencies of political institutions in the 

United States had certainly been towards democracy; 

but it cannot be said that the leading men 

Democracy . . , . 

in the United wcic hcaity OP uuanimous in their agreement 
^^*^®^' with this tendency. Not a few of them 
were pronounced republicans even before 1775, but the 
mass of them had no great objection to a monarchical 
form of government until the war-spirit had converted 
them. The Declaration of Independence had been di- 
rected rather against the king than against a king. Even 
after popular sovereignty had pronounced against a king, 
class spirit was for some time a fair substitute for aris- 
tocracy. The obstacles to communication, which com- 
pelled the mass of the people to live a very isolated 
existence, gave abnormal prominence and influence to 
those who, by ability or wealth, could overcome these 
obstacles ; and common feeling made these a class, with 
many symptoms of strong class feelings. As often 
happens, democracy at least thought of a Caesar when 
it apprehended class control. The discontented officers of 
the revolutionary armies offered to make Washington 
king, though he put the offer by without even consider- 
ing it. The suggestion of a return to monarchy in some 
form, as a possible road out of the confusion of the 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY. 121 

Confederation, occurs in the correspondence of some of 
the leading men. And while the convention of 1787 was 
holding its secret sessions a rumor went out that it had 
decided to offer a crown to an English prince. 

143. The State constitutions were democratic, ex- 
cept for property or other restrictions on the right of 
suffrage, or provisions carefully designed to oemocrac 
keep the control of at least one house of the in the states ; 
State legislature "in the hands of property." intheConsti- 
The Federal Constitution was so drawn that it ^"^'°"' 
would have lent itself kindly either to class control or to 
democracy. The electoral system of choosing the Presi- 
dent and Vice-President was altogether anti-democratic, 
though democracy has conquered it : not an elector, since 
1796, has disobeyed the purely moral claim of his party 
to control his choice (§§ 119, 120). Since the senate 
was to be chosen by the State legislatures, " property," 
if it could retain its influence in those bodies, could 
control at least one house of Congress. The question 
whether the Constitution was to have a democratic or an 
anti-democratic interpretation was to be settled in the 
next twelve years. 

144. The States were a strong factor in the final 
settlement, from the fact that the Constitution had left 
to them the control of the elective franchise : they were 
to make its conditions what each of them saw fit. Ke- 
ligious tests for the right of suffrage had been quite 
common in the colonies ; property tests were almost 
universal. The former disappeared shortly after the 
revolution ; the latter survived in some of the States far 
into the constitutional period. But the desire influence of im- 
to attract immigration was always a strong im- migration. 
pelling force to induce States, especially frontier States, 



122 THE UNITED STATES. 

to make the acquisition of full citizenship and political 
rights as easy and rapid as possible. This force >vas not 
so strong at first as it was after the great stream of 
immigration began about 1848 (§ 236), but it was enough 
to tend constantly to the development of democracy ; and 
it could not but react on the national development. In 
later times, when State laws allow the immigrant to vote 
even before the period assigned by Federal laws allows 
him to become a naturalized citizen, there have been 
demands for the modification of the ultra State democ- 
racy ; but no such danger was apprehended in the first 
decade. 

145. The Antifederalists had been a political party, 
but a party with but one principle. The absolute fail- 
ure of that principle deprived the party of all cohesion ; 

_ . ^. and the Federalists controlled the first two 

Organization 

of the new Gov- Cougresses almost entirely. Their pronounced 
ability was shown in their organizing meas- 
ures, which still govern the American system very largely. 
The departments of state, of the treasury, of war, of 
justice, and of the post-office were rapidly and success- 
fully organized ; Acts were passed for the regulation of 
seamen, commerce, tonnage duties, lighthouses, inter- 
course with the Indiaus, Territories, and the militia; 
a national capital was selected; a national bank was 
chartered ; the national debt was funded, and the State 
debts were assumed as part of it. The first four years of 
the new system showed that the States had now to deal 
with a very different power from the impotent Congress 
of the Confederation. The new power was even able to 
exert a pressure upon the two States which had not yet 
ratified the Constitution, though, in accordance with the 
universal American prejudice, the pressure was made as 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY. 123 

gentle as possible. As a first step, the higher duties 
imposed on imports from foreign countries were ex- 
pressly directed to apply to imports from North Carolina 
and Ehode Island. North Carolina having called a 
second convention, her case was left to the course of 
nature ; and the second convention ratified the Constitu- 
tion (November 21, 1789). The Rhode Island legislature 
wrote to ask that their State might not be considered 
altogether foreigners, made their duties agree with those 
of the new Government, and reserved the proceeds for 
"continental" purposes. Still no further steps were 
taken. A bill was therefore introduced directing the 
President to suspend commercial intercourse with Ehode 
Island, and to demand from her her share of the con- 
tinental debt. This was passed by the senate, and waited 
but two steps further to become law. Unofficial news- 
paper proposals to divide up the little State between her 
two nearest neighbors were stopped by her ratification 
(May 29, 1T90). All the "old thirteen" were thus 
united under the Constitution ; and yet, so completion of 
strong is the American prejudice for the au- ^^^ ^"'°"- 
tonomy of the States that these last two were allowed to 
enter in the full conviction that they did so in the exer- 
cise of sovereign freedom of choice. Their entrance, 
however, was no more involuntary than that of others. If 
there had been real freedom of choice, nine States would 
never have ratified: the votes of Pennsylvania, Massa- 
chusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, and New York were 
only secured by the pressure of powerful minorities in 
their own States, backed by the almost unanimous votes 
of the others. 

146. Protection was begun in the first Tariff Act, 
whose object, said its preamble, was the protection of 



124 THE UNITED STATES. 

domestic manufactures. The duties, however, ranged 
only from 71- to 10 per cent, averaging about 8^ per 
Hamiitonian ccut. The systcm, too, had rather a polit- 
protection. j^al than an economic basis. Until 1789 
the States had controlled the imposition of duties. The 
separate State feeling was a factor so strong that seces- 
sion was a possibility which every statesman had to take 
into account. Hamilton's object, in introducing the 
system, seems to have been to create a class of manu- 
facturers, running through all the States, but dependent 
for prosperity on the new Federal Government and its 
tariff. This would be a force which would make strongly 
for national Government, and against any attempt at 
secession, or against the tendency to revert in practice to 
the old system of control by State legislatures, even 
though it based the national idea on a conscious ten- 
dency towards the development of classes. The same 
feeling seems to have been at the bottom of his establish- 
ment of a national bank, his assumption of State debts, 
and most of the general scheme whicn his influence 
forced upon the Federal party. 

147. In forming his cabinet, Washington had paid 
attention to the opposing elements which had united 
for the temporary purpose of ratifying the 
' Constitution. The national element was 
represented by Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, 
and Knox, secretary of war; the particularist element 
(using the term to indicate support of the States, 
not of a State) by Jefferson, secretary of state, and 
Edmund Eandolph, attorney-general. It was not long 
before the drift of opinion in cabinet meetings showed 
an irreconcilable divergence, on almost every subject, 
between these two elements, and Hamilton and Jefferson 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY. 125 

became the representatives of the two opposite tenden- 
cies which have together made up the sum of public 
American history. At the end of 1792 matters were in 
train for the general recognition of the existence of two 
parties, whose struggles were to decide the course of the 
Constitution's development. The occasion came in the 
opening of the following year, when the new nation was 
first brought into contact with the French Eevolution. 

148. The controlling tendency of Jefferson and his 
school was to the maintenance of individual rights at 
the highest possible point, as the Hamilton 

school was always ready to assert the national son school of 
power to restrict individual rights for the p°''^'^^- 
general good. Other points of difference are rather 
symptomatic than essential. The Jefferson school sup- 
ported the States, not out of love for the States, but out 
of a belief that the States were the best bulwarks for 
individual rights. When the French Eevolution began 
its usual course in America by agitating for the " rights 
of man," it met a sympathetic audience in the Jefferson 
party and a cold and unsympathetic hearing from the 
Hamilton school of Federalists. The latter were far 
more interested in securing the full recognition of the 
power and rights of the nation than in securing the 
individual against imaginary dangers, as they thought 
them. For ten years, therefore, the surface marks of 
distinction between the two parties were to be con- 
nected with the course of events in Europe ; but the 
essence of distinction was not in the surface marks. 

149. The new Government was not yet four years 
old ; it was not familiar, nor of assured jhe Hamilton 
permanency. The only national G-overnments '^'^?°'- 

of which Americans had had previous experience were 



126 THE UNITED STATES. 

the British Government and the Confederation; in the 
former they had had no share, and the latter had had no 
power. The only places in which they had had long- 
continued, full, and familiar experience of self-govern- 
ment were their State Governments ; these were the 
only governmental forms which were then distinctly 
associated in their minds with the general notion of 
republican government. The governing principle of the 
Hamilton school, that the construction or interpretation 
of the terms of the Constitution was to be such as to 
broaden the powers of the Federal Government, neces- 
sarily involved a corresponding trenching on the powers 
of the States (§ 106). It was natural, then, that the 
Jefferson school should look on every feature of the 
Hamilton programme as " anti-republican," meaning, 
probably, at first no more than opposed to the State 
system as, hitherto known, though, with the growth of 
political bitterness, the term soon came to imply some- 
thing of monarchical, and, more particularly, of English 
tendencies. The disposition of the Jefferson school to 
claim for themselves a certain peculiar title to the posi- 
tion of " republicans " soon developed into the appear- 
ance of the first Kepublican party, about 1793. 

150. Many of the Federalists were shrewd and active 

business men, who naturally took promjjt advantage of 

the opportunities which the new system 

a y I erences. Q^^gj,^^^ rpj^^ Ecpublicaus therefore believed 

and asserted that the whole Hamilton programme was 
dictated by selfish or class interest; and they added 
this to the accusation of monarchical tendencies. These 
charges, with the fundamental differences of mental 
constitutiouj exasperated by the passion which differ- 
ences as to the French Eevolution seemed to carry with 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY. 127 

them everywhere, made the political history of this 
decade a very unpleasant record. The provision for 
establishing the national capital on the Potomac (1790) 
was declared to have been carried by a cor- 
rupt bargain; and accusations of corruption capital. 
were renewed at every opportunity. In 1793 

/-i 1 Genet's mission. 

a French agent, Genet, appeared to claim the 
assistance of the United States for the French republic. 
Washington decided to issue a proclamation of neutral- 
ity, the first act of the kind in American history. It 
was the first indication, also, of the policy which has 
made the course of every President, with the exception 
of Polk (§ 223), a determined leaning to peace, even 
when the other branches of the Government have been 
intent on war. The proclamation of 1793 brought about 
the first distinctly party feeling ; and it was jhe whiskey 
intensified by Washington's charge that insurrection. 
popular opposition in western Pennsylvania (1794) to 
the new excise law had been fomented by the extreme 
French party. Their name, Democrat, was applied by 
the Federalists to the whole Republican party as a term 
of contempt, but it was not accepted by the party for 
some twenty years ; then the compound title of " Demo- 
cratic-Republican " became, as it still is, the official title 
of the party. There was no party opposition. Admission of 
however, to the re-election of Washington in Vermont Ken- 

_ _ '-' tucky, and Ten- 

1792, or to the admission of Vermont (1791), nessee. 
Kentucky (1792), and Tennessee (1796) as new States. 

151. The British Government had accredited no min- 
ister to the United States, and it refused to make any 
commercial treaty or to give up the forts in the western 
territory of the United States, through which its agents 
still exercised a commandincr influence over the Indians. 



128 THE UNITED STATES. 

In the course of its war with France, the neutral American 
vessels, without the protection of a national navy, fared 
badly. A treaty negotiated by Chief-Justice 
ays treaty. j^_^ (1794) scttlcd thcsc difficulties for the 
following ten years. But, as it engaged the United 
States against any intervention in the war on behalf of 
France, and as it granted some unfamiliar privileges to 
Great Britain, particularly that of extradition, the Repub- 
licans made it very unpopular, and the first personal 
attacks on Washington's popularity grew out of it. In 
spite of occasional Republican successes, the Federalists 
retained a general control of national affairs ; they elected 
John Adams President in 1796, though Jeffer- 
son was chosen Vice-President with him ; and 
the national policy of the Federalists kept the country 
out of entangling alliances with any of the European 
belligerents. To the Republicans, and to the French 
republic, this last point of policy was only a j)ractical 
intervention against France and against the rights of 
man. 

152. At the end of Washington's administration the 
French Directory, following up its successes in G-ermany 
and Italy and its exactions from conquered powers, broke 
off relations with the United States, demanding the abro- 
gation of Jay's treaty and a more pronounced sympathy 
The"X.Y.z." with Fraucc. Adams sent three envoys to 
mission. endeavor to re-establish the former relations ; 
they were met by official or unofficial demands for "money, 
a great deal of money," as a prerequisite to peace. They 
refused; their letters home were published; and the 
Federalists at last had the opportunity of riding the 
whirlwind of an intense popular desire for war with 
France. Intercourse with France was suspended by Con- 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY. 129 

gress (1798) ; the treaties with France were declared at 
an end : American frigates were authorized to capture 
French vessels guilty of depredations on American com- 
merce, and the President was authorized to issue letters 
of marque and reprisal; and an American army was 
formed, Washington being called from his retirement at 
Mount Vernon to command it. The war Q^asi-war with 
never went beyond a few sea-fights, in which France. 
the little American navy did itself credit, and Napoleon, 
seizing power the next year, renewed the peace which 
should never have been broken. But the quasi-war had 
internal consequences to the young republic which sur- 
passed in interest all its foreign difficulties : it brought 
on the crisis which settled the development of the United 
States towards democracy. 

153. The reaction in Great Britain against the indefinite 
" rights of man " had led parliament to pass an alien law, 
a sedition law suspending the writ of habeas Error of the 
corpus, and an Act giving wide and scarcely Federalists. 
defined powers to magistrates for the dispersion of meet- 
ings to petition for redress of grievances. The Feder- 
alists were in control of a Congress of limited powers ; 
but they were strongly tempted by sympathies and antip- 
athies of every sort to form their programme on the 
model furnished from England. The measures which 
they actually passed were based only on that construction 
of the Constitution which is at the bottom of all Amer- 
ican politics ; they only tended to force the Constitution 
into an anti-democratic direction. But it was the fixed 
belief of their opponents that they meant to go farther, 
— to forget the limitations imposed by the ten years' old 
Constitution, and to secure their own control by some 
wholesale measure of political persecution. 



130 THE UNITED STATES. 

154. Three alien laws were passed. The first raised 
the number of years necessary for naturalization from 

five to fourteen. The third permitted the 

The Alien _ ^ 

and Sedition arrest of subjects of any foreign power with 
'■^'^^' which the United States should be at war. 
The second, which is usually known as the Alien Law, 
was limited to a term of two years ; it permitted the 
President to arrest or order out of the country any alien 
whom he should consider dangerous to the country. As 
many of the Republican editors and local leaders were 
aliens, this law really put the whole Republican organiza- 
tion in the power of the President elected by their oppo- 
nents. The Sedition Law made it a crime, punishable 
by fine and imprisonment, to publish or print any false, 
scandalous, and malicious writings against the Govern- 
ment of the United States, either house of Congress, or 
the President, with intent to defame them, or to bring 
them into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against 
them the hatred of the good people of the United States, 
or to stir up sedition or opposition to any lawful Act of 
Congress or of the President, or to aid the designs of any 
foreign power against the United States. In its first 
form jthe bill was even more loose and sweeping than 
this, and alarmed the opposition thoroughly. 

155. Almost all the ability of the country was in the 
Federalist ranks ; the Republicans had but two first-rate 

men — Jefferson and Madison. In the sudden 

The 

Republican issuc thus forccd bctwecn individual rights 
opposition. ^^^ national power, Jefferson and Madison 
could find but one bulwark for the individual — the 
power of the States ; and their use of it gave their 
party a permanent list to State sovereignty from which it 
did not recover for years. They objected to the Alien 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY. 131 

Law on the grounds that aliens were under the jurisdic- 
tion of the State, not of the Federal Government ; that 
the jurisdiction over them had not been transferred to 
the Federal Government by the ConstitutioUj and that the 
assumption of it by Congress was a violation of the Con- 
stitution's reservation of powers to the States ; and, 
further, because the Constitution reserved to every " per- 
son," not to every citizen, the right to a jury trial (§ 127). 
They objected to the Sedition Law on the grounds that 
the Constitution had specified exactly the four crimes for 
whose punishment Congress was to provide ; that crim- 
inal libel was not one of them ; and that Amendment I. 
forbade Congress to pass any law restricting freedom of 
speech or of the press. The Federalists asserted a com- 
mon-law power in Federal judges to punish for libel, and 
pointed to a provision in the Sedition Law permitting 
the truth to be given in evidence, as an improvement on 
the common law, instead of a restriction on individual 
liberty. 

156. The Eepublican objections might have been made 
in court, on the first trial. But the Republican leaders 
had strong doubts of the impartiality of the . , 

Federal judges, who were Federalists. They and Kentucky 
resolved to intrench the party in the State ^"°'^^'°"^- 
legislatures. The Virginia legislature in 1789 passed a 
series of resolutions prepared by Madison, and the Ken- 
tucky legislature in the same year passed a series pre- 
pared by Jefferson. Neglected or rejected by the other 
States, they were passed again by their legislatures in 
1799, and were for a long time the documentary basis of 
the Democratic party (§ 320). The leading idea ex- 
pressed in both was that the Constitution was a " com- 
pact" between the States, and that the powers (the 



132 THE UNITED STATES. 

States) which had made the compact had reserved the 
power to restrain the creature of the compact, the Fed- 
eral Government, whenever it undertook to assume pow- 
ers not granted to it. Madison's idea seems to have been 
that the restraint was to be imposed by a second conven- 
tion of the States. Jefferson's idea is more doubtful; 
if it meant that the restraint should be imposed by any 
State which should feel aggrieved, his scheme was merely 
Calhoun's idea of nullification (§ 206); but there are 
some indications that he agreed with Madison. 

157. The first Congress of Adams's term of office 
ended in 1799. Its successor, elected in the heat of the 
war excitement, kept the Federalist policy up to its first 

Effects of the pitcli. Out of Cougrcss tlic cxccution of the 
'^^®- objectionable laws had taken the shape of po- 
litical persecution. Men were arrested, tried, and punished 
for writings which the people had been accustomed to 
consider quite within legitimate political methods. Some 
of the charges were petty, and some ridiculous. The 
Eepublican leaders made every trial as public as possi- 
ble, and gained votes constantly, so that the Federalists 
began to be shy of the very powers which they had 
sought. Every new election was a storm-signal for the 
Federal party; and the danger was increased by the 
appearance of schism in their own ranks. 

158. Hamilton was now a private citizen of New York ; 
but he had the confidence of his party more largely than 

Federalist i^s uomiual head, the President, and he main- 
schism. tained close and confidential relations with 
the cabinet which Adams had taken unchanged from 
Washington. The Hamilton faction saw no way of pre- 
serving and consolidating the newly acquired powers of 
the Federal Government but by keeping up and increas- 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY. 133 



ing the war feeling against France; Adams had the 
instinctive leaning of an American President towards 
peace. Amid cries of wrath and despair from his party- 
he accepted the first overtures of the new Napoleonic 
Government, sent envoys to negotiate a peace, and ordered 
them to depart for France when they delayed too long. 
Then, discovering flat treachery in his cabinet, he dis- 
missed it and blurted out a public expression of his feel- 
ing that Hamilton and his adherents were "a British 
faction." Hamilton retorted with a circular letter to his 
party friends, denouncing the President ; the Republicans 
intercepted it and gave it a wider circulation than its 
author had intended ; and the Hamilton faction tried so 
to arrange the electoral vote that Pinckney should be 
chosen President in 1800 and Adams should 

, -I 1 1 • . ,1 • -1 -n Election of 1800. 

be shelved into the vice-presidency. Even so, 
the Federal party barely missed success. As things turned 
out, the result depended on the electoral vote of New 
York; and Aaron Burr, who had introduced the drill 
and machinery of a modern American political party 
there, had made the State Pepublican and secured a ma- 
jority for the Eepublican candidates. There was an eifort 
by the Federalists to disappoint the Eepublicans by mak- 
ing Burr President; but Jefferson obtained that office, 
Burr becoming Vice-President for four years (§ 120). 

159. The "revolution of 1800" decided the future 
development of the United States. The new dominant 
party entered upon its career weighted with -Rgyoi^^tion oi 
the theory of State sovereignty ; and a civil '^°°-" 
war was necessary before this dogma, put to use again 
in the service of slavery, could be banished from the 
American system. But the democratic development 
never was checked. From that time the interpretation 



134 THE UNITED STATES. 

of the Federal Constitution has generally favored indi- 
vidual rights at the expense of governmental power. As 
the Eepublicans obtained control of the States they 
altered the State constitutions so as to cut out all the 
arrangements that favored property or class interests, 
and reduced political power to the dead level of manhood 
suffrage. In most of the States outside of New England 
this process was completed before 1815 ; but New Eng- 
land tenacity was proof against the advancing revolution 
until about 1820. Eor twenty years after its downfall of 
1800 the Federal party maintained its hopeless strug- 
gle, and then it faded away into nothing, leaving as its 
permanent memorial the excellent organization of the 
Federal Government, which its successful rival hardly 
changed. Its two successors — the Whig and the second 
Eej)ublican party — have been broad-constructionist par- 
ties, like the Federal party, but they have admitted 
democracy as well; the Whig party adopted popular 
methods at least, and the Eepublican party grew into a 
theory of individual rights even higher than Jefferson's 
— the emancipation of enslaved labor. 

160. The disputed election of 1800 was decided in the 

new capital city of Washington, to which the Government 

had just been removed. Its streets and 

e new capi o . ^^^-^^ existcd ouly ou paper. The capitol 
had been begun ; the White House was unfinished, and 
its audience room was used by Mrs. Adams as a drying 
room for clothes ; and the Congressmen could hardly find 
lodgings. The inconveniences were only an exaggeration 
of the condition of other American cities. Their sani- 
tary conditions were so bad that yellow fever from time 
to time reduced them almost to depopulation. Again 
and again, during this decade, the fever visited Phila- 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY. 135 

delphia and New York, drove out the people, and left the 
grass growing in the streets. The communication be- 
tween the cities was still as bad as could be. The traveller 
was subject to every danger or annoyance 
that bad roads, bad carriages, bad horses, bad 
inns, and bad police protection could combine to inflict 
upon him. But the rising spirit of migration seemed to 
urge the people to conquer these difficulties. The first 
attempts were made to introduce turnpike roads and 
canals ; and proposals were advanced for greater improve- 
ments. The war with natural obstacles had fairly begun, 
though it had little prospect of success until steam was 
brought into use as the ally of man. 

161. About this time the term "the West" appears. 
It meant then the western part of New York State, the 
new territory north of the Ohio, and Kentucky 
and Tennessee. In settling land boundaries 
New York had transferred to Massachusetts, whose claims 
crossed her territory, the right to a large tract of land in 
central New York. The sale of this had carried popula- 
tion considerably west of the Hudson. After several 
American expeditions against the Ohio Indians had been 
defeated, another under General Anthony Wayne (1794) 
had compelled them to give up all the territory now in 
the State of Ohio. Settlement received a new impetus 
with increased security, and the new state of affairs 
added to the population of Kentucky, whose growth had 
been seriously checked by periodical attacks from the 
Indians across the Ohio. Between 1790 and 1800 the 
population of Ohio had risen from almost nothing to 
45,000, that of Tennessee from 36,000 to 106,000, and that 
of Kentucky from 74,000 to 221,000— the last-named 
State now exceeding five of the " old thirteen " in popu- 



136 THE UNITED STATES. 

lation. The difficulties of the western emigrant, how- 
ever, were still enormous. He obtained land of his own, 
fertile land and plenty of it, but little else. The produce 
of the soil had to be consumed at home, or near it ; ready 
money was scarce and distant products scarcer ; and 
comforts, except the very rudest substitutes of home 
manufacture, were unobtainable. The new life bore 
most hardly upon women ; and, if the record of woman's 
share in the work of American colonization could be fully 
made up, the price paid for the final success would seem 
very great. 

162. The number of post-offices rose during these ten 
years from 75 to 903, the miles of post-routes from 1900 

to 21,000, and the revenue from $38,000 to 
$231,000. These figures seem small in com- 
parison with the 25,000 post-offices, 375,000 miles of 
post-routes, and $45,000,000 of revenue of 1887, but the 
comparison with the figures of 1790 shows a development 
in which the new Constitution, with its increased security, 
must have been a factor. 

163. The power of Congress to regulate patents was 
already bearing fruit. Until 1789 this power was in the 

hands of the States, and the privileges of the 
inventor were restricted to the territory of the 
patenting State. Now he had a vast and growing terri- 
tory within which all the profits of the invention were 
his own, and that development began by which human 
invention has been urged to its highest point, as a factor 
in the struggle against natural forces. Twenty patents 
were issued in 1793, and 22,000 ninety years afterwards ; 
but one of the inventions of 1793, Whitney's cotton 
gin, has affected the history of the United States more 
than most of its wars or treaties. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY. 137 

164. When the Constitution was adopted it was not 
known that the cultivation of cotton could be made profit- 
able in the Southern States. The " roller gin " 

could clean only a half dozen pounds a day 
by slave labor. In 1784 eight bags of cotton landed 
in Liverpool from an American ship, were seized on the 
ground that so much cotton could not be the produce 
of the United States. Eli Whitney, a Connecticut school- 
teacher residing in Georgia, invented the saw-gin, by 
which the cotton was dragged through parallel wires 
with openings too narrow to allow the seeds to pass ; 
and one slave could now clean a thousand pounds a day. 
The exports of cotton leaped from 189,000 pounds in 1791 
to 21,000,000 pounds in 1801, and doubled in three years 
more. The influence of this one invention, combined 
with the wonderful series of British inventions which 
had paved the way for it, can hardly be estimated in its 
commercial aspects. Its political influences were even 
wider, but more unhappy. The introduction of the 
commercial element into the slave system of the south 
robbed it at once of the partriarchal features which had 
made it tolerable ; but, at the same time, it developed in 
slave-holders a new disposition to uphold and defend a 
system of slave labor as a " positive good.'' The aboli- 
tion societies of the south began to dwindle as soon as 
the results of Whitney's invention began to be manifest. 

165. The development of a class whose profits were 
merely the extorted natural wages of the black laborer 
was certain; and its political power was slavery and 
as certain, though it never showed itself democracy. 
clearly until after 1830. And this class was to have a 
peculiarly distorting effect on the political history of the 
United States. Aristocratic in every sense but one, it was 



138 THE UNITED STATES. 

ultra-Democratic (in a purely party sense) in its devotion 
to State sovereignty, for the legal basis of tlie slave sys- 
tem was in the laws of the several States. In time, the 
aristocratic element got control of the party which had 
originally looked to State rights as a bulwark of indi- 
vidual rights ; and the party was finally committed to 
the employment of its original doctrine for an entirely 
different purpose — the suppression of the black laborer's 
wages. 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 139 



VII. 

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 

1801-29. 

166. Whex Jefferson took office in 1801 he succeeded 
to a task larger than he imagined. His party, ignoring 
the natural forces which tied the States Democracy and 
together even against their wills, insisted that nationality. 
the legal basis of the bond was in the power of any State 
to withdraw at will. This was no nationality ; and for- 
eign nations naturally refused to take the American 
national coin at any higher valuation than that at which 
it was current in its own country. The urgent necessity 
was for a reconciliation between democracy and nation- 
ality ; and this was the work of this period. An under- 
lying sense of all this has led Democratic leaders to call 
the war of 1812-15 the " second war for independence " ; 
but the result was as much independence of past ideas as 
of Great Britain. 

167. The first force in the new direction was the 
acquisition of Louisiana (§32) in 1803. Napoleon had 
acquired it from Spain, and, fearing an attack 

upon it by Great Britain, offered it to the 
United States for $15,000,000. Jefferson and his party 
were eager to accept the offer ; but the Constitution gave 
the Federal Government no power to buy and hold terri- 
tory, and the party was based on a strict construction of 
the Constitution. Possession of power forced the strict- 



140 THE UNITED STATES. 

construction party to broaden its ideas, and Louisiana 
was bought, though Jefferson quieted his conscience by 
talking for a time of a futile proposal to amend the Con- 
stitution so as to grant the necessary power. The acqui- 
sition of the western Mississippi basin more than doubled 
the area of the United States, and gave them control of 
all the great river-systems of central North America. 
The difficulties of using these rivers were 
' removed almost immediately by Fulton's util- 
ization of steam in navigation (1807). Within four 
years steamboats were at work on western waters ; and 
thereafter the increase of steam navigation and that of 
population stimulated one another. Population crossed 
the Mississippi ; constantly increasing eddies filled up the 
vacant places to the east of the great river; and all 
sections of the country advanced as they had never 

Centre of advauccd bcforc. The ''centre of population " 
population. ]^g^g })een carefully ascertained by the census 
authorities for each decade, and it represents the west- 
ward movement of population very closely. During this 
period it advanced from about the middle of the State of 
Maryland to its extreme western limit ; that is, the centre 
of population was in 1830 nearly at the place which had 
been the western limit of population in 1770. 

168. Jefferson also laid the basis for a further acquisi- 
tion in the future by sending an expedition under Lewis 
The Oregon ^ud Clarke to explore the territory north of 

country. ^]-^g thcu Spanish territory of California and 
west of the Eocky Mountains — the " Oregon country '' as 
it was afterwards called (§§ 221, 224). The explorations 
of this party (1804), with Captain Gray's discovery of 
the Columbia river (1792), made the best part of the 
claims of the United States to the country forty years 
later. 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 141 

169. Jefferson was re-elected in 1804, serving until 
1809 ; his party now controlled almost all the States out- 
side of New England, and could elect almost 

, -.1 • ±.^ -1 Election of 1804. 

any one whom it chose to the presidency. 
Imitating Washington in refusing a third term of office, 
Jefferson established the precedent, which has not since 
been violated, restricting a President to two terms, though 
the Constitution contains no such restriction. The great 
success of his presidency had been the acquisition of 
Louisiana, which was a violation of his party. principles; 
but all his minor successes were, like this, recognitions 
of the national sovereignty which he disliked so much. 
After a short and brilliant naval war the Barbary pirates 
were reduced to submission (1805). And the authority 
of the nation was asserted for the first time in internal 
affairs. The long-continued control of New Orleans by 
Spain, and the persistent intrigues of the Spanish author- 
ities, looking towards a separation of the whole western 
country from the United States, had been ended by the 
annexation of Louisiana, and they will probably remain 
forever hidden in the secret history of the early west. 
They had left behind a dangerous ignorance of Federal 
power and control, of which Burr took advantage (1807). 
Organizing an expedition in Kentucky and Tennessee, 
probably for the conquest of the Spanish colony of 
Mexico, he was arrested on the lower Mississippi and 
brought back to Virginia. He was acquitted; but the 
incident opened up a vaster view of the national authority 
than democracy had yet been able to take. It had been 
said, forty years before, that Great Britain had long arms, 
but that 3000 miles was too far to extend them ; it was 
something to know now that the arms of the Federal 
Government were long enough to reach from Washington 
city to the Mississippi. 



142 THE UNITED STATES. 

170. All the success of Jefferson was confined to his 
first four years ; all his heavy failures were in his second 

Difficulties with term, in which he and his party as persist- 
Great Britain, ently rcfuscd to recognizc or assert the inher- 
ent power of the nation in international affairs. The 
Jay treaty expired in 1804 by limitation, and American 
commerce was thereafter left to the course of events, 
without any restriction of treaty obligations, since Jeffer- 
son refused to accept the only treaty which the British 
Government was willing to make. All the difficulties 
which followed may be summed up in a few words : 
the British Government was then the representative of 
the ancient system of restriction of commerce, and had 
a powerful navy to enforce its ideas ; the American 
Government was endeavoring to force into international 
recognition the present system of neutral rights and 
unrestricted commerce, but its suspicious democracy re- 
fused to give it a navy sufficient to command respect for 
its ideas. Indeed, the American Government did not 
want the navy ; it apparently expected to gain its objects 
without the exhibition of anything but moral force. 

171. Great Britain was now at war, from time to 
time, with almost every other nation of Europe. In 

Neutral com- time of pcacc, Europcau nations followed gen- 
merce. erally the old restrictive principle of allow- 
ing another nation, like the United States, no commercial 
access to their colonies ; but, when they were at war 
with Great Britain, whose navy controlled the ocean, 
they were very willing to allow the neutral American 
merchantmen to carry away their surplus colonial prod- 
uce. Great Britain had insisted for fifty years that the 
neutral nation, in such cases, was really intervening in 
the war as an ally of her enemy ; but she had so far 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 143 

modified her claim as to admit that " transshipment," or 
breaking bulk, in the United States was enough to 
qualify the commerce for recognition, no matter whither 
it was directed after transshipment. The neutral nation 
thus gained a double freight, and grew rich in the traffic ; 
the belligerent nations no longer had commerce afloat 
for British vessels to capture; and the "frauds of the 
neutral flags" became a standing subject of complaint 
among British merchants and naval officers. About 1805, 
British prize courts began to disregard transshipment, 
and to condemn American vessels which had made the 
voyage from a European colony to the mother country 
by way of the United States. This was really a restric- 
tion of American commerce to purely American produc- 
tions, or to commerce with Great Britain direct, with 
the payment of duties in British ports. 

172. The question of expatriation, too, furnished a good 
many burning grievances. Great Britain maintained the 
old German rule of perpetual allegiance, though 
she had modified it by allowing the right of 
emigration. The United States, founded by immigration, 
was anxious to establish what Great Britain was not 
disposed to grant, the right of the subject to divest him- 
self of allegiance by naturalization under a foreign ju- 
risdiction. Four facts thus tended to break off friendly 
relations : (1) Great Britain's claim to allegiance over 
American naturalized subjects ; (2) her claim to the 
belligerent right of search of neutral vessels; (3) her 
claim or right to impress for her vessels of 

•,■,.,-, ^ Impressment. 

war her subjects who were seamen wherever 
found; and (4) the difficulty of distinguishing native- 
born Americans from British subjects, even if the right 
to impress naturalized American subjects were granted. 



144 THE UNITED STATES. 

British naval officers even undertook to throw the on^is 
probandi upon Americans — to consider all who spoke 
the English language as British subjects, unless they 
could produce proof that they were native-born Ameri- 
cans. The American sailor who lost his papers was thus 
open to impressment. The American Government in 
1810 published the cases of such impressments since 
1803, as numbering over 4000, about one-third of the 
cases resulting in the discharge of the impressed man; 
but no one could say how many cases had never been 
brought to the attention of a Government which never 
did anything more than remonstrate about them. 

173. In May, 1806, the British Government, by orders 
in council, declared a blockade of the whole continent of 

Europe from Brest to the Elbe, about 800 miles. 

Orders m coun- ^ ' 

cii. In November, after the battle of Jena, Napo- 

Beriinand leou auswcrcd by the "Berlin decree,^' in 

Milan decrees. ^^^^^^^ ^^ assumed to blockadc the British 

Isles, thus beginning his " continental system.'' A year 
later the British Government answered by further orders 
in council, forbidding American trade with any country 
from which the British flag was excluded, allowing direct 
trade from the United States to Sweden only, in Ameri- 
can products, and permitting American trade with other 
parts of Europe only on condition of touching in Eng- 
land and paying duties. Napoleon retorted with the 
" Milan decree," declaring- good prize any vessel which 
should submit to search by a British ship ; but this was 
evidently a vain fulmination. 

174. The Democratic party of the United States was 

almost exclusively agricultural, and had little 

knowledge of or sympathy with commercial 

interests ; it had little confidence in the American navy j 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 145 

it was pledged to the reduction of national expenses and 
the debt, and did not wish to take on its shoulders the 
responsibility for a navy ; and, as the section of country 
most affected by the orders in council, New England, 
was Federalist, and made up the active and irreconcil- 
able opposition, a tinge of political feeling could not but 
color the decisions of the dominant party. Various 
ridiculous proposals were considered as substitutes for 
a necessarily naval war ; and perhaps the most ridiculous 
was adopted. Since the use of non-intercourse agree- 
ments as revolutionary weapons against Great Britain 
(§ 50), an overweening confidence in such measures had 
sprung up, and one of them was now resorted to — the 
embargo (1807), forbidding foreign commerce 
altogether. It was expected to starve Great 
Britain into a change of policy ; and its effects may be 
seen by comparing the ^20,000,000 exports of 1790, 
$49,000,000 of 1807, and 19,000,000 of 1808. It does 
not seem to have struck those who passed the measure 
that the agricultural districts also might find the change 
unpleasant ; but that was the result, and their complaints 
reinforced those of New England, and closed Jefferson's 
second term in a cloud of recognized misfortune. The 
pressure had been slightly relieved by the substitution 
of the Non-intercourse Law (1809) for the Non-intercourse 
embargo ; it prohibited intercourse with Great '^^• 
Britain and France and their dependencies, leaving other 
foreign commerce open ; but Madison, Jefferson's succes- 
sor in 1808-9, assumed in the presidency a 
burden which was not enviable. New Eng- 
land was in a ferment, and was even suspected of designs 
to resist the restrictive system by force (§ 180) ; and the 
administration did not feel secure enough in its position 
to face the future with confidence. 



146 THE UNITED STATES. 

175. The Non-intercourse Law was to be abandoned as 
to either belligerent which should abandon its attacks on 
neutral commerce, and maintained against the other. In 
1810 Napoleon officially informed the American Govern- 
ment that he had abandoned his system. He continued 
to enforce it in fact; but his official fiction served its 
purpose of limiting the non-intercourse for the future to 
Great Britain, and thus straining relations between that 
country and the United States still further. The elec- 
tions of 1811-12 resulted everywhere in the defeat of 
"submission men" and in the choice of new members 
who were determined to resort to war against Great 
Britain ; France had not been able to offer such concrete 
cases of injury as her enemy, and there was no general 
disposition to include her in the war. Clay, Calhoun, 
Crawford, and other new men seized the lead in the two 
hoiJses of Congress, and forced Madison to agree to a 
declaration of war as a condition of his re-election in 
Election of 1812. 1812. War was begun by the declaration of 
War with Eng- Juuc 18, 1812. Thc Ncw England Federalists 

'^"^- always called it " Mr. Madison's war," but the 
President was about the most unwilling participant 
in it. 

176. The national democracy meant to attack Great 
Britain in Canada, partly to gratify its western constitu- 
ency, who had been harassed by Indian attacks, asserted 
to have been instigated from Canada. Premonitions of 

success were drawn from the battle of Tippe- 
canoe, in which Harrison had defeated the 
north-western league of Indians formed by Tecumseh 
(1811). Between the solidly settled Atlantic States and 
Theatre of the the Canadian frontier was a wide stretch of 
^^^- unsettled or thinly settled country, which 



, • 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 147 

was itself a formidable obstacle to war. Ohio had been 
admitted as a State in 1802, and Louisiana was admitted 
in 1812 ; but their admission had been due to the desire 
to grant them self-government rather than to their full 
development in population and resources. Cincinnati 
was a little settlement of 2500 inhabitants ; the fringe of 
settled country ran not very far north of it ; and all be- 
yond was a wilderness of which little was known to the 
authorities. The case was much the same with western 
New York; the army which was to cross the Niagara 
river must journey almost all the way from Albany 
through a country far more thinly peopled than the far 
western territories are now. The difficulties of transport 
gave opportunities for peculation ; and a barrel of flour 
sometimes reached the frontier army with its cost mul- 
tiplied seven or eight fold. When a navy was to be 
built on the lakes, the ropes, anchors, guns, and all ma- 
terial had to be carried overland for a distance about 
equal to the length of England ; and even then sailors 
had to be brought to man the navy, and the vessels were 
built of green timber; one vessel was launched nine 
weeks after her timber was cut. It would have been 
far less costly, as events proved, to have entered at once 
upon a naval war ; but the crusade against Canada had 
been proclaimed all through Kentucky and the west, and 
their people were determined to wipe out their old scores 
before the conclusion of the war. 

177. The war opened with disaster — Hull's surrender 
of Detroit ; and disaster attended it for two years. Polit- 
ical appointments to positions in the regular Disasters by 
army were numerous, and such officers were '^'''^• 
worse than useless. The men were not fitly trained or 
supplied. The war department showed no great knowl- 



148 THE UNITED STATES. 

edge, and poverty put its little knowledge out of service. 
Several futile attempts at invasion were followed by de- 
feat or abortion, until the political officers were weeded 
out at the end of the year 1813, and Brown, Scott, Kip- 
ley, and others who had fought their way up were put in 
command. Then for the first time the men were drilled 
and brought into effective condition ; and two successful 
Chippewa and battlcs lu 1814 — Chlppcwa and Lundy's Lane 
Lundy's Lane. — tlircw somc glory ou the end of the war. 
So weak were the preparations even for defence that a 
British expedition in 1814 met no effective resistance 

when it landed and burned Washington. It 
^\^um?°" ^^^ defeated, however, in an attempt to take 

Baltimore. *-:. 

178. The American navy at the outbreak of the war 
numbered half a dozen frigates and about the same 
state of the numbcr of smaller vessels. This was but a 
"^^y- puny adversary for the thousand sail of the 
British navy, which had captured or shut up in port all 
the other navies of Europe. But the small number of 
American vessels, with the superabundance of trained 
officers, gave them one great advantage ; the training 
and discipline of the men, and the equipment of the 
vessels, had been brought to the very highest point. 
Captains who could command a vessel but for a short 
time, yielding her then to another officer, who was to 
take his sea service in rotation, were all ambitious to 
make their mark during their term. '' The art of 
handling and fighting the old broadside sailing frigate " 
had been carried in the little American navy to a 
point which unvarying success and a tendency to fleet- 
combats had now made far less common among British 
captains, ' 



u 



f 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 149 

179. The first year of the war saw five ship-duels, in 
all of which the American frigates either captured or 
sunk their adversaries. Four others followed 

in 1813, in two of which the British vessels 
came off victorious. The attention of the British 
Government had by that time been fully diverted to the 
North- American coast; its blockading fleets made it 
very difficult for the larger American vessels to get to 
sea ; and there were but seven other ship-combats, in only 
one of which the American vessel was taken. Most of the 
work was done by three frigates, the " Constitution," the 
" Essex," and the " United States." There was fighting 
also on the Great Lakes between improvised fleets of small 
vessels. Perry captured the British fleet on victories on the 
Lake Erie (1813) and Macdonough the Brit- '-^'^^«- 
ish fleet on Lake Champlain (1814). The former victory 
led to the end of the war in the west. Harrison, the 
American commander in that section, shipped Jiis army 
across the lake in Perry's fleet, and routed the British 
and Canadian army at the Thames. 

180. The home dislike to the war had increased stead- 
ily with the evidence of incompetent management by 
the administration. The Federalists, who had peeiing in New 
always desired a navy, pointed to the naval England. 
successes as the best proof of the folly with which 
the war had been undertaken and managed. New Eng- 
land Federalists complained that the Federal Govern- 
ment utterly neglected the defence of their coast, and 
that southern influence was far too strong in national 
affairs. They showed at every opportunity a disposition 
to adopt the furthest stretch of State sovereignty, as 
stated in the Kentucky resolutions ; and every such 
development urged the national democracy unconsciously 



150 THE UNITED STATES. 

further on the road to nationality. When the New Eng- 
Ny/ Hartford con- l^^cl States Sent delegates to meet at Hartford 
Av, vention. ^^^ considcr their grievances and the best 
^ remedies — a step perfectly proper on the Democratic 
theory of a " voluntary Union " — treason was suspected, 
and a readiness to suppress it by force was plainly shown. 
The recommendations of the convention came to nothing ; 
but the attitude of the dominant party towards it is one 
of the symptoms of the manner in which the trials of 
actual war were steadily reconciling democracy and na- 
tionality. The object which Hamilton had sought by 
high tariffs and the development of national classes had 
been attained by more natural and healthy means. 

181. In April, 1814, the first abdication of Napoleon 
took place, and Great Britain was able to give more 
attention to her American antagonist. The main attack 
was to be made on Louisiana, the weakest and most dis- 
tant portion of the Union. A fleet and army were sent 
thither, and, after much delay, landed below the city. 
The nearest settled country was Tennessee ; and between 
it and New Orleans was a wilderness four 
hundred miles long. Andrew Jackson had 
become the most prominent citizen of Tennessee, and he 
was ordered to the defence of New Orleans. His popu- 
larity and energy brought riflemen down the river and 
put them into position. The British assault was marred 
by hopeless blunders, and the gallantry of the men only 
made their slaughter and repulse more complete (Janu- 
ary 8, 1815). Peace had been made at Ghent 
fifteen days before the battle was fought, but 
the news of the battle and the peace reached Washington 
almost together, the former going far to make the latter 
tolerable. 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 151 

182. Though the land war had gone almost uniformly 
against the United States, and the American naval suc- 
cesses had been just enough to irritate the Eng- 
lish mind, and though the British negotiators 

had nothing to dread and everything to demand, the treaty 
was quite satisfactory to the United States. It is true 
that it said not a word about the questions of impress- 
ment, search, and neutral rights, the grounds of the war; 
Great Britain did not abandon her position on any of 
them. But everybody knew that circumstances had 
changed. The new naval power whose frigates alone in 
the past twenty years had shown their ability to fight 
English frigates on equal terms was not likely to be 
troubled in future with the question of impressment; 
and in fact, while not renouncing the right, the British 
Government no longer attempted to enforce it. The 
navy, it must be confessed, was the force which had at 
last given the United States a recognized and cordial 
acceptance in the family of nations ; it had solved the 
problem of the reconciliation of democracy and nation- 
ality. From this time the dominant party shows an 
increasing disposition to exalt and maintain the national 
element of the American system. 

183. The remainder of this period is one of the barren- 
est in American history. The opposition of the Federal 
party to the war completed the measure of 

f "^ . ^ Extinction 

its unpopularity, and it had only a perfunctory of the Federal 
existence for a few years longer. There was ^^'^^' 
but one real party, and the political struggles within it 
tended to take the shape of purely personal politics. 
Scandal, intrigue, and personal criticism became the 
most marked characteristics of American politics until 
the dominant party broke at the end of the period, and 



152 THE UNITED STATES. 

real party conflict was renewed. But the seeds of the 
final disruption are visible from the peace of 1814. The 
old-fashioned Eepublicans looked with intense suspicion 
on the new form of republicanism generated by the war, 
a type which instinctively bent its energies toward the 
further development of national power. Clay was the 
natural leader of the new democracy ; but John Quincy 
Adams and others of Federalist antecedents or leanings 
took to the new doctrines kindly; and even Calhoun, 
Crawford, and others of the southern interest, were at 
first strongly inclined to support them. One of the first 
effects was the revival of protection and of a national 
bank. 

184. The charter of the national bank (§ 146) had 
expired in 1811, and the dominant party had refused to 

Bank of the rcchartcr it. The attempt to carry on the 
United states, ^g^j. "by loaus rcsulted in almost a bankruptcy 
and in a complete inability to act efficiently. As soon as 
peace gave time for consideration, a second bank was 
chartered for twenty years, with a capital of $35,000,000, 
four-fifths of which might be in Government stock. It 
was to have the custody of the Government revenues, but 
the secretary of the treasury could divert the revenues to 
other custodians, giving his reasons for such action to 
Congress. This clause, meant to cover cases in which the 
Bank of the United States had no branch at a place 
where money was needed, was afterwards put to use for 
a very different purpose (§ 204). 

185. Protection was advocated again on national 
grounds, but not quite on those which had moved Ham- 
ilton (§ 146). The additional receipts were 
now to be expended for fortifications and 

other national defences, and for national roads and canals, 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 153 

the latter to be considered solely as military measures, 
with an incidental benefit to the people. Business dis- 
tress among the people gave additional force to the 
proposal. The war and blockade had been an active form 
of protection, under which American manufactures had 
sprung up in great abundance. As soon as peace was 
made English manufacturers poured their products into 
the United States, and drove their American rivals out 
of business or reduced them to desperate straits. Their 
cries to Congress for relief had a double effect. They 
gave the spur to the nationalizing advocates of protection, 
and, as most of the manufacturers were in New England 
or New York, they developed in the citadel of Federalism 
a class which looked for help to a Eepublican Congress, 
and was therefore bound to oppose the Federal party. 
This was the main force which brought New England 
into the Eepublican fold before 1825. An 

,, , J? • n i? Manufactures. 

increase in the number oi spindles irom 
80,000 in 1811 to 500,000 in 1815, and in cotton con- 
sumption from 500 bales in 1800 to 90,000 in 1815, the 
rise of manufacturing towns, and the rapid development 
of the mechanical tendencies of a people who had been 
hitherto almost exclusively agricultural, were influences 
which were to be reckoned with in the politics of a dem- 
ocratic country. 

186. The tariff of 1816 imposed a duty of about twenty- 
five per cent, on imports of cotton and woollen goods, 
and specific duties on iron imports. The ad 
valorem duties carried most of the manufac- 
turers through the financial crisis of 1818-19, but the 
iron duties were less satisfactory. In English manufac- 
ture the substitution of coke for charcoal in iron production 
led to continual decrease in price. As the price went 



154 THE UNITED STATES. 

down the specific duties were continually increasing the 
absolute amount of protection. Thus spared the necessity 
for improvements in production, the American manufac- 
turers felt English competition more keenly as the years 
went by, and called for more protection. VX 

187. Monroe succeeded Madison as Pr^sifent in 1817, 
and, re-elected with hardly any opposition in 1820, he 
served until 1825. So complete was the supremacy of the 
Eepublican party that this is often called "the era of 
good feeling." It came to an end when a successor to 
"Era of good Mouroc was to bc elected; the two sections 
feeling." ^f j-]^q domiuaut party then had their first 
opportunity for open struggle. During Monroe's two 
terms of office the nationalizing party developed the 
policy on which it proposed to manage national affairs. 
This was largely the product of the continually swelling 
western movement of population. The influence of the 
steamboat was felt more and more every year, and the 
want of a similar improvement in land transport was 
correspondingly evident. The attention drawn to western 
New York by the war had filled that part of the State 
with a new population. The Southern Indians had been 
completely overthrown by Jackson during the war of 
1812, and forced to cede their lands ; all the territory 
west of Georgia was thus opened up to settlement. The 
admission of the new States of Indiana (1816), 

Admission of . . , \ // 

Indiana, Mis- Mississippi (1817), Illiuois (1818), Alabama 

nds'^Aiaba' (1819), Maine (1820), and Missouri (1821)— 

ma. Maine, all but Maiuc tlic product and evidence of 

western growth — were the immediate results 

of the development consequent upon the war. All the 

territory east of the Mississippi, except the northern part 

of the north-west territory, was now formed into self- 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 155 

governing States ; the State system had already crossed 
the Mississippi ; and all that was needed for further de- 
velopment was the locomotive engine. The four millions 
of 1790 had grown into thirteen millions in 1830 ; and 
there was a steady increase of one-third in each decade. 

188. The urgent demand of western settlers for some 
road to a market led to a variety of schemes to facilitate 
intercourse between the east and the west, — the most 
successful being that completed in New York in 1825, 
the Erie Canal. The Hudson river forms the 
great natural breach in the barrier range 
which runs parallel to the Atlantic coast. When the 
traveller has passed up the Hudson through that range 
he sees before him a vast champaign country extending 
westward to the Great Lakes, and perfectly adapted by 
nature for a canal. Such a canal, to turn western traffic 
into the lake rivers and through the lakes, the canal, and 
the Hudson to New York city, was begun by the State 
through the influence of De Witt Clinton, was derisively 
called " Clinton's big ditch " until its completion, and 
laid the foundations for the great commercial prosperity 
of New York State and city. Long before it was finished 
the evident certainty of its success had seduced other 
States into far less successful enterprises of the kind 
and had established as a nationalizing policy the combi- 
nation of high tariffs and expenditures for internal im- 
provements which was long known as the "American 
system." The tariffs of duties on imports The "American 
were to be carried as high as revenue results system." 
would approve ; within this limit the duties were to be 
defined for purposes of protection ; and the superabun- 
dant revenues were to be expended for the improvement 
of roads, rivers, and harbors, and for every enterprise 



156 THE UNITED STATES. 

wliich would tend to aid the people in their efforts to 
subdue the continent. Protection was now to be for 
national benefit, not for the benefit of classes. Western 
farmers were to have manufacturing towns at their 
doors, as markets for the surplus which had hitherto 
been rotting on their farms ; competition among manu- 
facturers was to keep down prices ; migration to all the 
new advantages of the west was to be made easy at 
national expense ; and Henry Clay's eloquence was to 
commend the whole policy to the people. The old 
democracy, particularly in the south, insisted that the 
whole scheme really had its basis in benefits to classes, 
that its communistic features were not such as the Con- 
stitution meant to cover by its grant of power to Con- 
gress to levy taxation for the general welfare, and that 
any such legislation would be unconstitutional. The 
Tariffs of 1824 dissatisfactiou in the south rose higher when 
and 1828. ^^^q tariffs wcrc increased in 1824 and 1828. 
The proportion of customs revenue to dutiable imports 
rose to 37 per cent, in 1825 and to 44 per cent, in 1829 ; 
and the ratio to aggregate imports to 33 per cent, in 1825 
and 37 per cent, in 1829. As yet, however, the southern 
dissatisfaction showed itself only in resolutions of State 
legislatures. 

189. In the sudden development of the new nation 
circumstances had conspired to give social forces an ab- 
normally materialistic cast, and this had strongly influ- 
enced the expression of the national life. Its literature 
and its art had amounted to little, for the American 
people were still engaged in the fiercest of warfare against 
natural difficulties, which absorbed all their energies. 

190. In international relations the action of the Gov- 
ernment was strong, quiet, and self-respecting. Its first 



DEMOCRACY AND NATION A.LITY. 157 

weighty action took place in 1823. It had become pretty 
evident that the Holy Alliance, in addition to its inter- 
ventions in Europe to suppress popular risings, meant to 
aid Spain in bringing her revolted South American colo- 
nies to obedience. Great Britain had been drifting steadily 
away from the Alliance, and Canning, the new secretary, 
determined to call in the weight of the trans-Atlantic 
power as a check upon it. A hint to the American 
minister was followed by a few pregnant passages in 
President Monroe's annual message in De- jhe Monroe 
cember. Stating the friendly relations of the doctrine. 
United States with the new South American republics, 
he went on to say, " We could not view an interposition 
for oppressing them (the South American states), or con- 
trolling in any other manner their destiny by any Euro- 
pean power, in any other light than as a manifestation o-f 
an unfriendly disposition towards the United States." If 
both the United States and Great Britain were to take 
this ground the fate of a fleet sent by the Alliance 
across the Atlantic was not in much doubt, and the 
project was at once given up. The " Monroe doctrine," 
however, has remained the rule of foreign intercourse 
for all American parties. Added to the already estab- 
lished refusal of the United States to become entangled 
in any European wars or alliances, it has separated the 
two continents, to their common advantage. 

191. It was supposed at the time that Spain might 
transfer her colonial claims to some stronger power ; and 
Mr. Monroe therefore went on to say that " the The colonial 
American continents should no longer be sub- ^\^^^^- 
jects for any new European colonial settlement." The 
meaning of this was well understood at the time ; and, when 
its condition failed, the statement lost its force. It has 



158 THE UNITED STATES. 

been supposed that it bound the United States to resist 
any further establishment of European colonies in the 
Americas. Such a role of universal arbiter has always 
been repudiated by the United States, — though its sym- 
pathies, more or less active, must always go with any 
American republic which falls into collision with any 
such colonizing scheme. 

192. By a treaty with Eussia (1825) that power gave 
up all claims on the Pacific coast south of the present 

The north-west Umits of Alaska. The northern boundary of 
boundary, ^hc United states had been settled by the 
treaty of 1783 ; and, after the acquisition of Louisiana, a 
convention with Great Britain settled the boundary on 
the line of 49° N. lat. as far west as the Kocky Moun- 
tains (1818). West of these mountains the so-called 
Oregon country (§ 168), on whose limits the two pow- 
ers could not agree, was to be held in common possession 
for ten years. This common possession was prolonged 
by another convention (1827) indefinitely, with the priv- 
ilege to either power to terminate it on giving twelve 
months' notice. This arrangement lasted until 1846 
(§ 224). 

193. Monroe's terms of office came to an end in 1825. 
He had originally been an extreme Democrat, who could 
hardly speak of Washington with patience ; he had slowly 
changed into a very moderate Kepublican, whose tenden- 
cies were eagerly claimed by the few remaining Feder- 
alists as identical with their own. The nationalizing 
faction of the dominant party had scored almost all the 
successes of the administration, and the divergence be- 
tween it and the opposing faction was steadily becoming 
more apparent. All the candidates for the presidency in 
1824 — Andrew Jackson, a private citizen of Tennessee ; 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 159 

William H. Crawford, Monroe's secretary of the treas- 
ury j John Quincy Adams, his secretary of state ; and 
Henry Clay, the speaker of the house of 
representatives — claimed to be Republicans 
alike ; but the personal nature of the struggle was shown 
by the tendency of their supporters to call themselves 
" Adams men " or " Jackson men," rather than by any real 
party title. Calhoun was supported by all parties for 
the vice-presidency, and was elected without difficulty. 
The choice of a President was more doubtful. 

194. None of the four candidates had anything like a 
party organization behind him. Adams and Clay repre- 
sented the nationalizing element, as Crawford 
and Jackson did not ; but there the likeness ^ ^ ivergence. 
among them stopped. The strongest forces behind 
Adams were the new manufacturing and commercial in- 
terests of the east ; behind Clay were the desires of the 
west for internal improvements at public expense as a 
set-off to the benefits which the seaboard States had 
already received from the Government ; and the two ele- 
ments were soon to be united into the National Republican 
or Whig party. Crawford was the representative of the 
old Democratic party, with all its southern influences 
and leanings. Jackson was the personification of the 
new democracy — not very cultured, perhaps, but honest, 
and hating every shade of class control instinctively. As 
he became better known the whole force of the new drift 
of things turned in his direction ; "hurrah for Jackson" 
undoubtedly often represented tendencies which the 
speaker would have found it hard to express otherwise. 
Crawford was taken out of the race, just after this elec- 
tion, by physical failure, and Adams by the revival of 
ancient quarrels with the Federalists of New England; 



160 THE UNITED STATES. 

and the future was to be with Clay or with Jackson. But 
in 1824 the question of success among the four was not 
an easy one to decide. The electors gave no one a ma- 
jority ; and the house of representatives gave the presi- 
dency to Adams (§§ 119, 120). 

195. Adams's election in 1824 was due to the fact 
that Clay's friends in the house — unable to vote for him, 
as he was the lowest in the electoral vote, and only three 
names were open to choice in the house — very naturally 
gave their votes to Adams. As Adams appointed Clay 

The Adams ad- to the leading position in his cabinet, the 
ministration, defeated party at once raised the cry of 
" bargain and intrigue," one of the most effective in a 
democracy, and it was kept up throughout Adams's four 
years of office. Jackson had received the largest number 
of electoral votes, though not a majority ; and the hazy 
notion that he had been injured because of his devotion 
to the people increased his popularity. Though dema- 
gogues made use of it for selfish purposes, this feeling 
was an honest one, and Adams had nothing to oppose to it. 
He tried vigorously to uphold the " American system," 
and succeeded in passing the tariff of 1828 ; he tried to 
maintain the influence of the United States on both the 
American continents ; but he remained as unpopular as 
his rival grew popular. In 1828 Adams was 
easily displaced by Jackson. Calhoun was 
re-elected Vice-President. 

196. Jackson's inauguration in 1829 closes this period, 
as it ends the time during which a disruption of the 

Democracy and Uniou by the pcaceablc withdrawal of any 

nationality, gtate was cvcu possiblc. The party which 

had made State sovereignty its bulwark in 1798 was 

now in control of the Government again ; but Jackson's 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 161 

proclamation in his first term, in which he warned 
South Carolina that "disunion by armed force is trea- 
son," and that blood must flow if the laws were re- 
sisted, speaks a very different tone from the speculations 
of Jefferson on possible future divisions of the United 
States. And even the sudden attempt of South Carolina 
to exercise independent action (§ 206), which would 
have been looked upon as almost a right forty years 
before, shows that some interest dependent upon State 
sovereignty had taken alarm at the evident drift of 
events, and was anxious to lodge a claim to the right 
before it should slip from its fingers forever. Nullifica- 
tion was but the first skirmish between the two hostile 
forces of slavery and democracy. 

197. When the vast territory of Louisiana was ac- 
quired in 1803 the new owner found slavery already 
established there by custom recognized by 
French and Spanish law. Congress tacitly ^^^^^* 
ratified existing law by taking no action; slavery con- 
tinued legal, and spread further through the territory ; 
and the State of Louisiana entered as a slave State in 
1812. The next State to be carved out of the territory 
was Missouri, admitted in 1821. A Territory, on apply- 
ing for admission as a State, brings a constitution for 
inspection by Congress ; and when it was found that the 
new State of Missouri proposed to recognize and con- 
tinue slavery, a vigorous opposition spread through the 
north and west, and carried most of the senators and 
representatives from those sections with it. In the 
house of representatives these two sections had a greatly 
superior number of members ; but, as the number of 
Northern and Southern States had been kept about 
equal, the compact southern vote, with one or two 



162 THE UNITED STATES. 

northern allies, generally retained control of the senate. 
Admitted by the senate and rejected by the house, 
Missouri's application hung suspended for several years, 
until it was successful by the admission of Maine, a 
balancing Northern State, and by the following arrange- 
The Missouri Hient, kuowu as the Missouri compromise of 
compromise. j^820 : Missouri was to enter as a slave 
State; slavery was forever prohibited throughout the 
rest of the Louisiana purchase north of lat. 36° 30', the 
main southern boundary of Missouri; and, though 
nothing was said of the territory south of the com- 
promise line, it was understood that any State formed 
out of it was to be a slave State, if it so wished (§ 249). 
Arkansas entered under this provision in 1836. 

198. The question of slavery was thus set at rest for 
the present, though a few agitators were roused to more 

Sectional diver- zcalous opposltloH to the csscuce of slavery 
gence. itsclf. In the next decade these agitators 
succeeded only in the conversion of a few recruits, but 
these recruits were the ones who took up the work at 
the opening of the next period and never gave it up 
until slavery was ended. It is plain now, however, that 
north and south had already drifted so far apart as to 
form two sections, and that, as things stood, their drift 
for the future could only be further apart, in spite of 
the feeble tie furnished by the Missouri compromise. It 
became evident, during the next forty years, that the 
wants and desires of these two sections were so diver- 
gent that it was impossible for one Government to make 
satisfactory laws for both. The moving cause was not 
removed in 1820 ; one of its effects was got out of the 
way for the time, but others were soon to take its place. 

199. The vast flood of human beings which had been pour- 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 163 

ing westward for years had now pretty well occupied the 
territory east of the Mississippi, while, on the 

•^ „, -..-ni 1 T The settled area. 

west side of that stream, it still showed a dis- 
position to hold to the river valleys. The settled area 
had increased from 240,000 square miles in 1790 to 633,- 
000 square miles in 1830, with an average of 20.3 persons 
to the square mile. There was still a great deal of In- 
dian territory in the Southern States of Georgia, Alabama, 
and Mississippi, and in Florida, for the southern Indians 
were among the finest of their race ; they had become 
semi-civilized, and were formidable antagonists to the en- 
croaching white race. The States interested had begun 
preparations for their forcible removal, in public de- 
fiance of the attempts of the Federal Government to pro- 
tect the Indians (1827) ; but the removal was not com- 
pleted until 1835. In the north, Wisconsin and Michi- 
gan, with the northern halves of Illinois and Indiana, 
were still very thinly settled, but everything indicated 
early increase of population. The first lake 
steamboat, the " Walk-in-the- Water," had ap- 
peared at Detroit in 1818, and the opening of the Erie 
Canal added to the number of such vessels. Lake Erie 
had seven in 1826 ; and in 1830, while the only important 
lake town, Detroit, was hardly yet more than a frontier 
fort, a daily line of steamers was running to it from 
Buffalo, carrying the increasing stream of emigrants to 
the western territory. 

200. The land system of the United States had much 
to do with the early development of the west. From 
the first settlement, the universally recog- 
nized rule had been that of absolute individual ^ ^" ^^^ ^"'' 
property in land, with its corollary of unrestricted com- 
petitive or " rack " rents : and this rule was accepted fully 



164 THE UNITED STATES. 

in the national land system, whose basis was reported by 
Jefferson, as chairman of a committee of the Confedera- 
tion Congress (1785). The public lands were to be di- 
vided into hundreds of ten miles square, each containing 
one hundred mile-square plots. The hundred was called 
a " township," and was afterwards reduced to six miles 
square, of thirty-six mile-square plots of 640 acres each. 
From time to time principal meridians and east and west 
base lines have been run, and townships have been deter- 
mined by their relations to these lines. The sections 
(plots) have been subdivided, but the transfer describes 
each parcel from the survey map, as in the case of " the 
southwest quarter of section 20, township 30, north, range 
1 east of the third principal meridian." The price fixed 
in 1790 as a minimum was two dollars per acre ; it has 
tended to decrease, and no effort has ever been made to 
gain a revenue from it. When the nation acquired its 
western territory it secured its title to the soil, and always 
made it a fundamental condition of the admission of a 
new State that it should not tax United States lands. 
To compensate the new States for the freedom of unsold 
public lands from taxation, one township in each thirty- 
six was reserved to them for educational purposes ; and 
the excellent public school systems of the Western States 
have been founded on this provision. The cost of ob- 
taining a quarter section (160 acres), under the still 
later homestead system of granting lands to actual set- 
tlers, has come to be only about twenty-six dollars ; the 
interest on this, at six per cent., represents an annual 
rent of one cent per acre — making this, says F. A. Walker, 
as nearly as possible the " no-rent land " of the econo- 
mists. 

201. The bulk of the early westward migration was of 



DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY. 165 

home production ; the great immigration from Europe did 
not begin until about 1847 (§ 236). The 

... Immigration. 

west as well as the east thus had its institu- 
tions fixed before being called upon to absorb an enor- 
mous foreign element. 



166 THE UNITED STATES. 



VIII. 

INDUSTEIAL DEVELOPMENT AND SECTIONAL 
DIVEKGENCE. 

1829-50. 

202. The eight years after 1829 have been called " the 
reign of Andrew Jackson " ; his popularity, his long 

New political strugglc for the presidency, and his feeling of 
methods. ]^{^ official owncrship of the subordinate offices 
gave to his administration at least an appearance of 
Caesarism. But it was strictly constitutional Caesarism ; 
the restraints of written law were never violated, though 
the methods adopted within the law were new to national 
politics. Since about 1800 State politics in New York 
and Pennsylvania had been noted for the systematic use 
of the offices and for the merciless manner in which the 
office-holder was compelled to work for the party which 
kept him in place. The presence of New York and 
Pennsylvania politicians in Jackson's cabinet taught him 
to use the same system. Kemovals, except for cause, had 
been almost unknown before ; but under Jackson men 
were removed almost exclusively for the purpose of 
installing some more serviceable party tool ; and a clean 
sweep was made in the civil service. Other parties 
adopted the system, and it has remained the rule at a 
change of administration until comparatively recent years 
(§ 323). 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 



203. The system brought with it a semi-military reor- 
ganization of parties. Hitherto nominations for the 
more important offices had been made mainly 

^ *' The new 

by legislative caucuses ; candidates for Presi- organization of 
dent and Vice-President were nominated by p^^'^^- 
caucuses of Congressmen, and candidates for the higher 
State offices by caucuses of the State legislatures. Late 
in the preceding period " conventions " of delegates from 
the m,embers of the party in the State occur in New York 
and Pennsylvania ; and in 1831-32 this became the rule 
for presidential nominations. It rapidly developed into 
systematic State, county, and city " conventions " ; and 
the result was the appearance of that complete political 
machinery, the American political party, with its local 
organizations, and its delegates to county. State, and 
national conventions. The Democratic machinery was 
the first to appear, in Jackson's second term (1833-37). 
Its workers were paid in offices, or hopes of office, so that 
it was said to be built on the " cohesive power of public 
plunder"; but its success was immediate and brilliant. 
The opposing party, the Whig party, had no chance of 
victory in 1836; and its complete overthrow drove its 
leaders into the organization of a similar machinery of 
their own, which scored its first success in 1840. Since 
that time these strange bodies, unknown to the law, have 
governed the country by turns ; and their enormous 
growth has steadily made the organization of a third 
piece of such machinery more difficult or hopeless. 

204. The Bank of the United States had hardly been 
heard of in politics until the new Democratic organization 
came into hostile contact with it. A semi- Bank of the 
official demand upon it for a political appoint- ^"'^^"^ ^^^^®^' 
ment was met by a refusal ; and the party managers 



168 THE UNITED STATED. 

called Jackson's attention to an institution whicli he 
could not but dislike the more he considered it. His 
first message spoke of it in unfriendly terms, and every 
succeeding message brought a more open attack. The 
old party of Adams and Clay had by this time taken 
the name of Whigs, probably from the notion 

The Whig party. ^ , ,. . 

that they were struggling against " the reign 
of Andrew Jackson," and they adopted the cause of the 
bank with eagerness. The bank charter did not expire 
until 1836, but in 1832 Clay brought up a bill for a new 
charter. It was passed and vetoed (§ 113) ; and the 
Whigs went into the presidential election of that year 
on the veto. They were beaten; Jackson was re-elected; 
and the bank party could never again get a majority in 
the house of representatives for the charter. The insist- 
ence of the President on the point that the charter was a 
"monopoly" bore weight with the people. But the Pres- 
ident could not obtain a majority in the senate. He 
determined to take a step which would give him an 
initiative, and which his opponents could not induce both 
houses to unite in overriding or punishing. Taking 
Removal of the advantage of the provision that the secre- 
deposits. ^a^py Qf ^i^Q treasury might order the public 
funds to be deposited elsewhere than in the bank or its 
branches (§ 184), he directed the secretary to deposit all 
the public funds elsewhere. Thus deprived of its great 
source of dividends, the bank fell into difficulties, became 
a State bank after 1836, and then went into bankruptcy. 
205. All the political conflicts of Jackson's terms of 
office were close and bitter. Loose in his ideas before 
1829, Jackson shows a steady tendency to adopt the 
strictest construction of the powers of the Federal Gov- 
ernment, except in such official perquisites as the offices. 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 169 

He grew into strong opposition to all traces of the 
"American system," and vetoed bills for in- ^ 

^ ' Opposition 

ternal improvements unsparingly; and his to the " Amer- 
feeling of dislike to all terms of protection is "^^" system. 
as evident, though he took more care not to make it 
too public. There are many reasons for believing that 
his drift was the work of a strong school of leaders 
— Van Buren, Benton, Livingston, Taney, Woodbury, 
Cass, Marcy, and others — who developed the policy of 
the party, and controlled it until the great changes 
of parties about 1850 took their power from them. 
At all events, some persistent influence made the Dem- 
ocratic party of 1830-50 the most consistent and suc- 
cessful party which had thus far appeared in the United 
States. 

206. Calhoun and Jackson were of the same stock — 
Scottish-Irish — much alike in appearance and cha^racter- 
istics, the former representing the trained caihounand 
and educated logic of the race, the latter its Jackson. 
instincts and passions. Jackson was led to break off his 
friendly relations with Calhoun in 1830, and he had been 
led to do so more easily because of the appearance of the 
doctrine of nullification, which was generally attributed, 
correctly enough, to the authorship of Calhoun. Assert- 
ing, as the Eepublican party of 1798 had done, the 
sovereign powers of each State, Calhoun held that, as a 
means of avoiding secession and violent struggle upon 
every occasion of the passage of an Act of Congress 
which should seem unconstitutional to any State, the 
State might properly suspend or " nullify " the operation 
of the law within its jurisdiction, in order 

. J , •, • , • • , • Nullification. 

to protect its citizens against oppression. 

Webster, of Massachusetts, and Hayne, of South Caro- 



170 THE UNITED STATES. 

Una, debated the question in the senate in 1830, and the 
supporters of each claimed a virtual victory for their 
leader. The passage of the Tariff Act of 1832, which 
organized and systematized the protective system, forced 
the Calhoun party into action. A State convention in 
South Carolina declared the Tariff Act null and not law 
or binding on the people of the State, and made ready to 
enforce the declaration. 

207. But the time was past when the power of a single 
State could withdraw it from the Union. The Presi- 
dent issued a proclamation, warning the people of South 
Carolina against any attempt to carry out the ordinance 
of nullification ; he ordered a naval force to take posses- 
sion of Charleston harbor to collect the duties under the 
Act ; he called upon Congress for additional executive 
powers, and Congress passed what nullifiers called the 
"bloody bill," putting the land naval forces at the disposal 
of the President for the collection of duties against "un- 
lawful combinations " ; and he is said to have announced, 
privately and profanely, his intention of making Calhoun 
the first victim of any open conflict. Affairs looked so 
threatening that an unofficial meeting of " leading nulli- 
fiers " agreed to suspend the operation of the ordinance 
until Congress should adjourn; whence it derived the 
right to suspend has never been stated. 

208. The President had already asked Congress to 
reduce the duties ; and many Democratic members of Con- 
gress, who had yielded to the popular clamor for Protec- 
tion, were very glad to use the " crisis " as an excuse for 

now voting^ as^ainst it. A compromise Tariff 

Tariff of 1833. . , v 5 n i ^- i. 

Act, scaling dovv^n ail duties over twenty per 
cent, by one-tenth of the surplus each year, so as to bring 
duties to a uniform rate of twenty per cent, in 1843, 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. Ill 

was introduced by Clay and became law. Calhoun and 
his followers claimed this as all that the nullification 
ordinance had aimed at ; and the ordinance was formally 
repealed. But nullification had received its death-blow ; 
even those southern leaders who maintained the right 
of secession refused to recognize the right of a State to 
remain in the Union while nullifying its laws ; and, 
when protection was reintroduced by the tariff of 1842, 
nullification was hardly thought of. 

209. All the internal conditions of the United States 
were completely altered by the introduction of railways. 
For twenty years past the Americans had jhe locomotive 
been pushing in every direction which offered engme. 

a hope of the means of reconciling vast territory with 
enormous population. Stephenson's invention of the 
locomotive came just in time, and Jackson's two terms 
of office marked the outburst of modern American life. 
English engines were brought over in 1829, and served 
as models for a year or two ; and then the lighter forms 
of locomotives, better suited to American conditions, 
were introduced. The miles of railroad were 23 in 1830, 
1098 in 1835, nearly 2000 in 1840, and thereafter they 
about doubled every five years until 1860. 

210. A railway map of 1840 shows a fragmentary 
system, designed mainly to fill the gaps left by the means 
of communication in use in 1830. One or two 

short lines run back into the country from ^' "^^^^ ° 
Savannah and Charleston ; another runs north along the 
coast from Wilmington to Baltimore ; several lines con- 
nect New York with Washington and other points ; and 
short lines elsewhere mark the openings which needed 
to be filled at once — a number in New England and the 
middle States, three in Ohio and Michigan, and three in 



172 THE UNITED STATES. 

Louisiana. Year after year new inventions came in to 
increase and aid this development. The an- 
thracite coal of the middle States had been 
known since 1790 (§ 19), but no means had been de- 
vised to put the refractory agent to work. It was now 
successfully applied to railroads (1836), and 
to the manufacture of iron (1837). Hitherto 
wood had been the best fuel for iron making ; now the 
States which relied on wood were driven out of com- 
petition, and production was restricted to the States in 
which nature had placed coal alongside of iron. Steam 
Ocean naviga- uavigatiou across tlic Atlantic was established 
tion. ij^ 1838. The telegraph came next, Morse's 
The telegraph. i[^q heiug crcctcd iu 1844. The spread of the 
railway system brought with it, as a natural develop- 
ment, the rise of the American system of express com- 
panies, whose first phases of individual enterprise 
appeared in 1839. ISTo similar period in American his- 
tory is so extraordinary for material development as the 
decade 1830-40. At its beginning the country was an 
overgrown type of colonial life ; at its end American life 
had been shifted to entirely new lines, which it has since 
followed. Modern American history had burst in with 
the explosiveness of an Arctic summer. 

211. If the steamboat had aided western development, 
the railway made it a freshet. Cities and States grew 
Western settle- ^s if the oxygcu of their surroundings had 
naent. bccu Suddenly increased. The steamboat in- 
fluenced the railway, and the railway gave the steam- 
boat new powers. Vacant places in the States east of 
the Mississippi were filling up ; the long lines of emi- 
grant wagons gave way to the new and better methods 
of transport; and new grades of land were made ac- 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 173 

cessible. Chicago was but a frontier fort in 1832; 
within a half-dozen years it was a flourishing town, with 
eight steamers connecting it with Buffalo, and dawning 
ideas of its future development of railway connections. 
The maps change from decade to decade, as mapmakers 
hasten to insert new cities which have sprung up. Two 
new States, Arkansas and Michigan, were ad- ,_, . . 

' . Admission of 

mitted (1836 and 1837). The population of Arkansas and 
Ohio leaps from 900,000 to 1,500,000, that of '^"''^'"• 
Michigan from 30,000 to 212,000, and that of the country 
from 13,000,000 to 17,000,000, between 1830 and 1840. 

212. With the change of material surroundings and 
possibilities came a steady amelioration of social con- 
ditions and a development of social ideals, social condi- 
Such features of the past as imprisonment for ^'°"®- 
debt and the cruel indifference of old methods of dealing 
with crime began to disappear ; the time was past when 
a State could use an abandoned copper-mine as its State 
prison. The domestic use of gas and anthracite coal, 
the introduction of expensive aqueducts for pure water, 
and the changing life of the people forced changes in the 
interior and exterior of American dwellings. Wood was 
still the common building material ; imitations of Greek 
architecture still retained their vogue ; but the interiors 
were models of comfort in comparison with the houses 
even of 1810. In the " new " regions this was not yet 
the case, and here social restraints were still so few that 
society seemed to be reduced almost to its primitive 
elements. Western steamers reeked with gambling, 
swindling, duelling, and every variety of vice. Public 
law was almost suspended in some regions ; and organ- 
ized associations of counterfeiters and horse-thieves 
terrorized whole sections of country. But this state of 



174 THE UNITED STATES. 

affairs was altogetlier temporary, as well as limited in 
its area ; the older and more densely settled States had 
been well prepared for the change and had never lost 
command of the social forces, and the process of settling 
down went on, even in the newer States, with far more 
rapidity than could reasonably have been expected. 
Those who took part in the movements of population 
in 1830-40 had been trained under the rigid forms of 
the previous American life ; and these soon reasserted 
themselves. The rebound was over before 1847, and the 
Western States were then as well prepared to receive 
and digest the great immigration which followed as the 
older States would have been in 1830. 

213. A distinct American literature dates from this 
period. Most of the publications in the United States 

were still cheap reprints of foreign works ; 

but native productions no longer followed 
foreign models with servility. Between 1830 and 1840 
Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, Poe, Hawthorne, Emer- 
son, Bancroft, and Prescott joined the advance-guard of 
American writers — Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, Irving, 
and Cooper; and even those writers who had already 
made their place in literature showed the iDfluence of 
new conditions by their growing tendency to look less 
to foreign models and methods than before 1830. Popu- 
lar education was improved. The new States had from 
the first endeavored to secure the best possible system 
of common schools. The attempt came naturally from 
the political instincts of the class from which the mi- 
gration came ; but the system Avhich resulted was to be of 
Common school incalculable service during the years to come. 
system. Their absolute democracy and their universal 
use of the English language have made the common 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 175 

schools most successful machines for converting the raw 
material of immigration into American citizens. This 
supreme benefit is the basis of the system and the reason 
for its existence and development, but its incidental 
benefit of educating the people has been beyond cal- 
culation. It was an odd symptom of the 
general change that American newspapers ^^^p^p®^^- 
took a new form during these ten years. The old 
"blanket-sheet" newspaper, cumbrous to handle and 
slow in all its ways, met its first rival in the type of 
newspaper which appeared first in New York city, in 
the Sun, the Herald, and the Tribune (1833, 1835, and 
1841). Swift and energetic in gathering news, and 
fearless, sometimes reckless, in stating it, they brought 
into American life, with very much that is evil, a great 
preponderance of good. 

214. The chaos into which a part of American society 
had been thrown had a marked effect on the financial 
institutions of the country, which went to 
pieces before it for a time. It had not been 
meant to make the public lands of the United States a 
source of revenue so much as a source of development. 
The sales had touched their high-water mark during the 
speculative year 1819, when receipts from them had 
amounted to ^3,274,000; in other years they seldom 
went above $2,000,000. When the railroad set the 
stream of mio^ration moving faster than ever, and cities 
began to grow like mushrooms, it was natual that specu- 
lation in land should feel the effects. Sales 
rose to $3,200,000 in 1831, to $4,000,000 in ^p'''''''°"- 
1833, to $5,000,000 in 1834, to $15,000,000 in 1835, 
and to $25,000,000 in 1836. In 1835 the President 
announced to Congress that the public debt was extin- 



176 THE UNITED STATES. 



guished, and that some way of dealing with, the surpkis 
should be found. Calhoun's proposal, that after the 
year 1836 all revenue above $5,000,000 should be divided 
among the States as a loan, was adopted, though only 
one such loan was made. The States had already taken 
a hand in the general speculation by beginning works of 
public improvement. Foreign, particularly English, 
capital was abundant ; and States which had been accus- 
tomed to seek a dozen times over a tax of a hundred 
thousand dollars now began to negotiate loans of millions 
of dollars and to appropriate the proceeds to the digging 
of canals and the construction of railroads. Their enter- 
prises were badly conceived and badly managed, and 
only added to the confusion when the crash came. If 
the Federal Government and the States felt that they 
were rich, the imaginations of individuals ran riot. 
Every one wanted to buy; prices rose, and every one 
was growing rich on paper. The assessed value of real 
estate in New York city in 1832 was f 104,000,000; in 
1736 it had grown to $253,000,000. In Mobile the 
assessed value rose from $1,000,000 to $27,000,000. 
Fictitious values were the rule everywhere. 

215. When Jackson (1833) ordered the Government 

revenues to be deposited elsewhere than in the Bank of 

the United States (§ 204), there was no 

orpora ions. Q.Qygpj-^j-^^gjj^ agcut to reccivc tlicm. The 

secretary of the treasury selected banks at various points 
in which the revenue should be deposited by the collect- 
ing officers ; but these banks were organized under 
charters from their States, as were all banks except that 
of the United States. The theory of the dominant 
party denied the constitutional power of Congress to 
charter a bank, and the States had not yet learned how 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. Ill 

to deal with such, institutions. Their grants of bank 
charters had been based on ignorance, intrigue, favorit- 
ism, or corruption, and the banks were utterly unregu- 
lated. The democratic feeling was that the privilege of 
forming banking corporations should be open to all citi- 
zens, and it soon became so. Moreover it was not until 
after the crash that ISTew York began the system of com- 
pelling such deposits as would really secure circulation, 
which was long afterward further developed into the pres- 
ent national bank system. In most of the States banks 
could be freely organized with or without tangible capi- 
tal, and their notes could be sent to the West for the 
purchase of Government lands, which needed to be held 
but a month or two to gain a handsome profit. " Wild- 
cat banks " sprang up all over the country, and the " pet 
banks," as those chosen for the deposit of Government 
revenues were called by their rivals, went into specula- 
tion as eagerly as the banks which hardly pretended to 
have capital. 

216. The Democratic theory denied the power of Con- 
gress to make anything but gold or silver legal tender. 
There have been "paper-money heresies" in The "specie 
the party but there were none such among circular." 
the new school of Democratic leaders which came in in 
1829; they were "hard-money men." In 1836 Jackson's 
secretary of the treasury ordered land agents to take noth- 
ing in payment for lands except gold or silver. In the 
following spring full effects of the order became evident ; 
they fell on the administration of Van Buren, Jackson's 
successor. Van Buren had been Jackson's secretary of 
state, the representative man of the new Democratic 
school, and, in the opinion of the opposition, the evil 
genius of the Jackson administration ; and it seemed to 



178 THE UNITED STATES. 

the Whigs poetic justice that he should bear the weight 
of his predecessor's errors. The "specie circular" 
turned the tide of paper back to the east, and, when it 
was presented for payment most of the banks suspended 
specie payment with hardly a struggle. There was no 
longer a thought of buying ; every one wanted to sell ; 
and prices ran down with a rapidity even more startling 
than that with which they had risen. Failures, to an 
extent and on a scale unprecedented in the United States, 
made up the " panic of 1837." Many of the 
States had left their bonds in the hands of 
their agents, and, on the failure of the latter, found that 
the bonds had been hypothecated or disposed of, so that 
the States got no return from them except a debt which 
was to them enormous. Saddled suddenly with such a 
burden, and unable even to pay interest, many 
of the States '^ repudiated " their obligations ; 
and repudiation was made successful by the fact that a 
State cannot be sued except by its own consent (§ 65). 
Even the Federal Government felt the strain, for its rev- 
enues were locked up in suspended banks. A little more 
than a year after Congress had authorized the distribution 
of its surplus revenues among the Sta,tes, Van Buren was 
forced to call it into special session to provide some relief 
for the Government itself. 

217. Van Buren held manfully to the strictest con- 
struction of the powers of the Federal Government. He 
insisted that the panic would best right itself without 
Government interference, and, after a four years' strug- 
gle, he succeeded in making the " sub-treasury scheme " 
Sub-treasury l^w (1840). It cut off all conncctiou of the 
scheme. Govcmment with banks, putting collecting 
and disbursing officers under bonds to hold money safely 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 179 

and to transfer it under orders from the treasury, and re- 
stricting payments to or by the United States to gold 
and silver. Its passage had been proceeded by another 
commercial crisis (1839), more limited in its field, but 
more discouraging to the people. It is true that Jackson, 
in dealing with the finances, had " simply smashed things," 
leaving his successor to repair damages ; but it is far from 
certain that this was not the best way available at the time. 
The wisest scheme of financial reform would have had 
small chance of success with the land-jobbers in Congress j 
and Van Buren's firmness found the way out of the chaos. 
218. Van Buren's firmness was unpopular; and the 
Whig party now adopted methods which were popular, 
if somewhat demagogical. It nominated 
Harrison in 1840; it contrasted his homely 
frontier virtues with Van Buren's " ostentatious indiffer- 
ence to the misfortunes of the people " and with his sup- 
posed luxury of his life in the White House ; and, after 
the first of the modern " campaigns " of mass meetings 
and processions, Harrison was elected. He died soon 
after his inauguration (1841), and the Vice-President, 
Tyler, became President. Tyler was of the extreme 
Calhoun school, which had shown some disposition to 
grant to Van Buren a support which it had refused to 
Jackson ; and the Whigs had nominated Tyler to retain 
his faction with them. Now he was the nominal leader of 
the party, while his politics were opposite to theirs, and 
the real leader of the party. Clay, was ready to force a 
quarrel upon him. The quarrel took place ; the Whig 
majority in Congress was not large enough to pass any 
measures over Tyler's veto ; and the first two years of his 
administration were passed in barren conflict with his 
party. The " sub-treasury " law was repealed (1841) ; 



180 THE UNITED STATES. 

the tariff of 1842 introduced a modified protection ; and 

there the Wliigs were forced to stop. Their dissensions 

made democratic success comparatively easy, 

and Tyler had the support of a Democratic 

house behind him during the last two years of his term. 

219. The success of the Democratic machinery, and 
the reflex of its temporary check in 1840, with the influ- 
ences brought to bear on it by the returning Calhoun 
faction, were such as to take the control of the party out 
of the hands of the leaders who had formed it. They 
had had high regard for political principle, even though 
they were willing to use doubtful methods for its propa- 
gation ; these methods had now brought out new men, 
who looked mainly to success, and to close connection 
with the controlling political element of the south as 
the easiest means of attaining success. When the 
Democratic convention of 1844 met it was expected to 
renominate Van Buren. A majority of the delegates 
had been sent there for that purpose, but many of them 
would have been glad to be prevented from doing so. 
They allowed a resolution to be passed making a two- 
thirds vote necessary for nomination; Van Buren was 
unable to command so many votes ; and, when his name 
was withdrawn, Polk was nominated. The Whigs nomi- 
nated Clay. 

220. Up to the beginning of the abolitionist move- 
ment in the United States, the establishment of the 

Abolitionist Liberator (1831) and of the American Anti- 
mo.ement. Slavery Society (1833) "abolition'' had 
meant gradual abolition; it was a wish rather than a 
purpose. Garrison called for immediate abolition. The 
basis of the American system was in the reserved rights 
of the States, and slavery rested on their will, which 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 181 

was not likely to be changed. But the cry was kept up. 
The mission of the abolitionists was to force the people 
to think of the question ; and, in spite of riots, assaults, 
and persecution of every kind, they fulfilled it manfully. 
It was inevitable that, as the northern people were 
brought unwillingly to think of the question, they should 
look with new eyes on many of its phases j while in the 
south many who might dislike slavery were disposed to 
resist the interferences with State rights which the new 
proposal involved. In truth, slavery was more and more 
out of harmony with the new economic conditions which 
were rapidly taking complete control of the north and 
west, but had hardly been felt in the south. Thus the 
two sections, north and south, were more and more dis- 
posed to take opposite views of everything in which 
slavery was involved, and it had a faculty of involving 
itself in almost everything. The status of slavery in 
the Territories had been settled in 1820 (§ 197) ; that of 
slavery in the States had been settled by the Constitu- 
tion ; but even in minor questions the intrusive element 
had to be reckoned with. The abolitionists sent their 
documents through the mails, and the south wished the 
Federal Government to interfere and stop the practice. 
The abolitionists persisted in petitioning Congress for 
the passage of various measures which Congress re- 
garded as utterly unconstitutional; and the disposition 
of Congress to deny or regulate the right of petition in 
such matters excited the indignation of northern men 
who had no sympathy with abolition. But the first 
occasion on which the views of the two sections came 
into flat contrast was on the question of the annexation 
of Texas. 

221. The United States had had a vagrue claim to 



182 THE UNITED STATES. 

Texas until 1819, when the claim was surrendered to 
Spain in part compensation for Florida. On 
the revolt of Mexico, Texas became a j^art of 
that republic. It was colonized by Americans, mainly 
southerners and slave-holders, and seceded from Mexico 
in 1835, defeating the Mexican armies and establishing 
its independence. Southern politicians desired its an- 
nexation to the United States for many reasons. Its 
people were kindred to them ; its soil would widen the 
area of slavery ; and its territory, it was hoped, could be 
divided into several States, to reinforce the southern 
column in the senate. People in the north were either 
indifferent or hostile to the proposal ; Van Buren had 
declared against it, and his action was the secret reason 
for his defeat in the Democratic convention. On the 
other hand, there were indications th&>t the 
joint occupation of the Oregon country (§ 192) 
could not last much longer. American immigration into 
it had begun, while the Hudson's Bay company, the Eng- 
lish tenant of the soil, was the natural enemy of immi- 
gration. To carry the sentiment of both sections, the 
two points were coupled ; and the Democratic convention 
declared for the reannexation of Texas and the reoccupa- 
tion of Oregon. 

222. One of the cardinal methods of the political 
abolitionists was to nominate candidates of their own 
against a doubtful friend, even though this 
' ^ ^ "^^ ^' secured the election of an open enemy. Clay's 
efforts to guard his condemnation of the Texas annexation 
project were just enough to push the Liberty party, the 
political abolitionists, into voting for candi- 
dates of their own in New York ; on a close 
vote their loss was enough to throw the electoral votes 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 183 

of that State to Polk, and its votes decided the result. 
Polk was elected (November, 1844) ; and Texas was an- 
nexed to the United States in the following Admission of 
spring. At the next meeting of Congress "''^^^^• 
(1845) Texas was admitted as a State. 

223. West of Texas the northern prolongation of Mex- 
ico ran right athwart the westward movement of Ameri- 
can population ; and, though the movement had not yet 
reached the barrier, the Polk administration desired fur- 
ther acquisitions from Mexico. The western boundary 
of Texas Avas undefined ; a strip of territory claimed by 
Texas was settled exclusively by Mexicans ; but the Polk 
administration directed Taylor, the American commander 
in Texas, to cross the Nueces river and seize the disputed 
territory. Collisions with Mexican troops followed 5 they 
were beaten in the battles of Palo Alto and Eesaca de la 
Palma, and were chased across the Rio Grande. Taylor 
followed, took the city of Monterey, and established him- 
self far within northern Mexico. 

224. On the news of the first bloodshed. Congress 
declared war against Mexico, over the opposition of the 
Whigs. A land and naval force took posses- ^^^ ^.^^ 
sion of California, and a land expedition occu- Mexico. 
pied New Mexico, so that the authority of Conquest of 
Mexico over all the soil north of her present 
boundaries was abruptly terminated (1846). At the 
opening of 1847, Taylor fought the last battle in northern 
Mexico (Buena Vista j, defeating the Mexi- Buena vista. 
cans, and Scott, with a new army, landed at scott's cam- 
Vera Cruz for a march upon the city of Mex- p^'^"- 
ico. Scott's march was marked by one sue- ^^^^^■ 
cessful battle after another, usually against heavy odds ^ 
and in September he took the capital city and held it 



184 THE UNITED STATES. 

until peace was made (1848) by the treaty of Guadalupe 
Hidalgo. Among the terms of peace was the cession of 
the present State of California and the Territories of 
Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, the consideration being 
a payment of $15,000,000 by the United States and 
the assumption of some $3,000,000 of debts due by Mex- 
ico to American citizens. With a subsequent rectifica- 
tion of frontier (1853), this cession added some 500,000 
square miles to the area of the United States ; Texas 
itself made up some 375,000 square miles more. The 
settlement of the north-west boundary between Oregon 
and British Columbia (§ 221), giving its own share to 
each country (1846), with the Texas and Mexican ces- 
sions, gave the United States the complete territorial 
form retained until the annexation of Alaska in 1867. 

225. In the new territory slavery had been forbidden 
under Mexican law ; and its annexation brought up the 

Slavery in the qucstion of its status uudcr American law. 

new Territory, jjg ^^^ rcmembers the historical fact 'that 
slavery had never been more than a custom, ultimately 
recognized and protected by State law, will not have 
much difficulty in deciding about the propriety of forcing 
such a custom by law upon any part of a territory. But, 
if slavery was to be excluded from the new territory, the 
States which should ultimately be formed out of it would 
enter as free States, inclined to take an anti-slavery view 
of doubtful questions ; and the influence of the south in 
the senate would be decreased. For the first time the 
south appears as a distinct imperiurti in imperio in the 
territorial difficulties which began in 1848. 

226. The first appearance of these difficulties brought 
out in the Democratic party a solution which was so 
closely in line with the prejudices of the party, and 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 185 

apparently so likely to meet all the wishes of the south, 
that it bade fair to carry the party through the crisis 
without the loss of its southern vote. This "Squatter 
was " squatter sovereignty," the notion that sovereignty." 
it would be best for Congress to leave the people of each 
Territory to settle the question of the existence of slavery 
for themselves. The broader and democratic ground for 
the party would have been that which it at first seemed 
likely to take, — the " Wilmot proviso," a condition pro- 
posed to be added to the Act authorizing ac- 

•"■ . •Til Wilmot proviso. 

quisitions of territory, providing that slavery 
should be forbidden in all territory to be acquired under 
the Act. In the end apparent expediency carried the 
dominant party off to "squatter sovereignty," and the 
Democratic adherents of the Wilmot proviso, with the 
Liberty party and the anti-slavery Whigs, united in 1848 
under the name of the Free- Soil party. The 
Whigs had no solution to offer ; their entire 
programme, from this time to their downfall as a party, 
consisted in a persistent effort to evade or ignore all 
difficulties connected w4th slavery. 

227. Taylor, after the battle of Buena Vista, resigned 
and came home, considering himself ill-used by the ad- 
ministration. He refused to commit himself to any 
party ; and the Whigs were forced to accept him as their 
candidate in 1848. The Democrats nominated 

_, _ -r-, 1 -1 Election of 1848. 

Cass ; and the Free-Sou party or " Free-boil- 
ers," nominated Van Buren. By the vote of the last- 
named party the Democratic candidate lost New York 
and the election, and Taylor was elected President. Tak- 
ing office in 1849, he had on his shoulders the w^hole burden 
of the territorial difficulties aggravated by the discovery 
of gold in California and the sudden rise of popula- 



186 THE UNITED STATES. 

tion there. Congress was so split into factions that it 
could for a long time agree upon nothing 5 thieves and 
outlaws were too strong for the semi-military government 
of California ; and the jDcople of that Territory, with the 
approval of the President, proceeded to form a constitu- 
tion and apply for admission as a State. They had so 
framed their constitution as to forbid slavery ; and this 
was really the application of the Wilmot proviso to the 
richest part of the new Territory, and the south felt that 
it had been robbed of the cream of what it alone had 
fought cheerfully to obtain. 

228. The admission of California was not secured until 
September, 1850, just after Taylor's sudden death, and 

Admission of tlicu ouly by the addition of a bonus to Texas, 
California, -j^j^g dlvislou of thc rcst of thc Mexican cession 
into the Territories of Utah and New Mexico without 
mention of slavery, and the passage of a Fugitive Slave 
Law. The slave trade, but not slavery, was forbidden in 
the District of Columbia. The whole was generally 
known as the compromise of 1850. Two of its features 
Compromise of ^Gcd notice. As has been said, slavery was 
'^^°' not mentioned in the Act ; and the status of 
slavery in the Territories was thus left uncertain. Con- 
gress can veto any legislation of a territorial legislature, 
but, in fact, the two houses of Congress were hardly ever 
able to unite on anything after 1850, and both these Ter- 
ritories did establish slavery before 1860, without a Con- 
gressional veto. The advantage here was with the south. 

Fugitive Slave Tlic otlicr poiut, thc FugitivB Slave Law, was 
'-^^- a special demand of the south. The Constitu- 
tion contained clauses directing that agitive criminals 
and slaves should be delivered up, on requisition, by the 
State to which they had fled (§ 124). In the case of 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 187 

criminals the delivery was directed to be made by the 
executive of the State to which they had fled ; in the 
case of slaves no delivering authority was specified, and 
an Act of Congress in 1793 had imposed the duty on 
Federal judges or on local State magistrates. Some of 
the States had passed ^' personal liberty laws," forbidding 
or limiting the action of their magistrates in Personal liberty 
such cases ; and the Act of 1850 transferred '^'^^■ 
the decision of such cases to United States commission- 
ers, with the assistance of United States marshals. It 
imposed penalties on rescues, and denied a jury trial. 
All the ill effects of the law were not felt until a year or 
two of its operation had passed (§ 244). 

229. The question of slavery had taken up so much 
time in Congress that its other legislation was compara- 
tively limited. The rates of postage were reduced to five 
and ten cents for distances less and greater than 300 
miles (1845) ; and the naval school at Annapolis was 
established the same year. The military school at 
West Point had been established in 1794. When the 
Democratic party had obtained complete control of the 
government, it re-established the " sub-treasury," or inde- 
pendent treasury (1846), which is still the 

basis of the treasury system. In the same 
year, after an exhaustive report by Eobert J. Walker, 
Polk's secretary of the treasury, the tariff of 1846 was 
passed; it reduced duties, and cut out all forms of pro- 
tection. With the exception of a slight additional re- 
duction of duties in 1857, this remained in force until 
1861. 

230. Five States were admitted during the last ten 
years of this period, — Florida (1845), Texas (1845), 
Iowa (1846), Wisconsin (1848), and California (1850). 



188 THE UNITED STATES. 

The early entrance of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Florida had 

been due largely to Indian wars, — the Black Hawk war 

in Iowa and Wisconsin (1832), and the Seminole war 

,, . . in Florida (1835-37), after each of which 

Admission '^ ^ ' 

of Florida, Iowa, the dcfcatcd Indians were compelled to cede 
and Wisconsin. ^^^^^ ^^ ^^^ prlcc of pcacc. Tlic extinc- 
tion of Indian titles in northern Michigan brought 
about the discovery of the great copper fields of that 
region, whose existence had been suspected long before 
it could be proved. Elsewhere settlement followed the 
lines already marked out, except in the new possessions 
on the Pacific coast, whose full possibilities were not yet 
Railways and kuowu. Kailroads in the Eastern States were 
telegraphs, beginning to show something of a connected 
system; in the south they had hardly changed since 
1840 ; in the west they had only been prolonged on their 
original lines. The telegraph, which was to make man 
master of even the longest and most complicated systems, 
was brought into use in 1844 ; but it is not until the 
census of 1860 that its effects are seen in the fully con- 
nected network of railroads which then covers the whole 
north and west (§ 273). 

231. The sudden development of wealth in the country 

gave an impetus to the spirit of invention. Goodyear's 

method of vulcanizing rubber (1839) had come 

invention. . -\Tir-i • i i i 

into use. M'Cormick had made an invention 
whose results have been hardly less than that of the 
locomotive in their importance to the United States. 
He had patented a reaping-machine in 1834, and this, 
further improved and supplemented by other inventions, 
had brought into play the whole system of agricultural 
machinery whose existence was scarcely known elsewhere 
until the London " World's Fair " of 1851 brought it into 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 189 

notice. It was agricultural macliinery that made western 
farms profitable and enabled the railroads to fill the west 
so rapidly (§ 278). A successful sewing-machine came 
in 1846 ; the power-loom and the surgical use of anaes- 
thetics in the same year ; and the rotary press for print- 
ing in 1847. 

232. All the conditions of life were changing so rap- 
idly that it was natural that the minds of men should 
change with them or become unsettled. This was the 
era of new sects, of communities, of fantastic proposals 
of every kind, of transcendentalism in literature, religion, 
and politics. Not the most fantastic or benevolent, but 
certainly the most successful, of these was the sect of 
Mormons or Latter-day Saints. They settled 

1 m, • n TT -I • -I r, irr IT TheMormons. 

m the new Territory ot Utah m 1847, calling 
their capital Salt Lake City, and spreading thence through 
the neighboring Territories. There they have become a 
menace to the American system ; their numbers are so 
great that it is against American instincts to deprive 
them of self-government and keep them under a Con- 
gressional despotism ; while their polygamy and submis- 
sion to their hierarchy make it impossible to erect them 
into a State which shall have complete control of mar- 
riage and divorce. 

233. The material development of the United States 
since 1830 had been extraordinary, but every year made 
it more evident that the south was not shar- 
ing in it. It is plain now that the fault was 

in the labor system of the south : her only laborers 
were slaves, and a slave who was fit for anything better 
than field labor was prima fade a dangerous man. The 
process of divergence had as yet gone only far enough to 
awaken intelligent men in the south to the fact of its 



190 THE UNITED STATES. 



existence, and to stir tliem to efforts as hopeless as they 
were earnest, to find some artificial stimulus for southern 
industries. In the next ten years the process was to 
show its effects on the national field. 



TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. 191 



IX. 

TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. 

1850-61. 



234. The abolitionists had never ceased to din the 
iniquity of slavery into the ears of the American people. 
Calhoun, Webster, and Clay, with nearly all slavery and the 

j the other political leaders of 1850, had united sections. 
in deploring the wickedness of these fanatics, who were 
persistently stirring up a question which was steadily 

I widening the distance between the sections. They mis- 
took the symptom for the disease. Slavery itself had 

' put the south out of harmony with its surroundings, and 

\ still more out of harmony with the inevitable lines of 
the country's development. Even in 1850, though they 
hardly yet knew it, the two sections had drifted so far 
apart that they were practically two different countries. 

235. The case of the south was one of arrested devel- 
opment. The south remained very much as in 1790 ; 
while other parts of the country had devel- jhe" slave 
oped, it had stood still. The remnants of power." 
colonial feeling, of class influence, which advancing 
democracy had wiped out elsewhere, retained all their 
force here, aggravated by the effects of an essentially 
arictocratic system of employment. The ruling class had 
to maintain a military control over the laboring class, 
and a class influence over the poorer whites. It had 



l9^ THE UNITED STATES. 

even secured in the Constitution provision for its political 
power in tlie representation given to tliree-fiftlis of the 
slaves. The twenty additional members of the house of 
representatives were not simply a gain to the south ; 
they were still more a gain to the "black districts/' 
where whites were few, and the slave-holder controlled 
the district. Slave-owners and slave-holders together, 
there were but 350,000 of them ; but they had common 
interests, the intelligence to see them, and the courage to 
contend for them. The first step of a rising man was to 
buy slaves ; and this was enough to enroll him in the 
dominant class. From it were drawn the representatives 
and senators in Congress, the governors, and all the 
holders of offices over which the "slave power," as it 
came to be called, had control. Not only was the south 
inert; its ruling class, its ablest and best men, were 
united in defence of tendencies which were alien and 
hostile to those of the rest of the country. 

236. Immigration into the United States was not an 
important factor in its development until about 1847. 
The immigrants, so late as 1820, numbered 
but 8000 per annum; their number did not 
touch 100,000 until 1842, and then it fell for a year or 
two almost to half that number. In 1847 it rose again to 
235,000, in 1849 to 300,000, and in 1850 to 428,000 ; all 
told, more than two and a quarter million persons from 
abroad settled in the United States between 1847 and 
1854. Taking the lowest estimates, — eighty dollars each 
for the actual amount of money brought in by immi- 
grants, and eight hundred dollars each for their indus- 
trial value to the country, — the wealth-increasing influ- 
ence of such a stream of immigration may be calculated. 
Its political effects were even greater, and were all in 



TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. 193 

the same direction. Leaving out the dregs of the immi- 
gration, which settled down in the seaboard cities, its 
best part was a powerful nationalizing force. It had not 
come to any particular State, but to the United States ; 
it had none of the traditional prejudices in favor of a 
State, but a strong feeling for the whole country ; and 
the new feelings which it brought in must have had their 
weight not only on the gross mass of the people, but on 
the views of former leaders. And all the influences of 
this enormous immigration were confined to the north 
and west, whose divergence from the south thus received 
a new impetus. The immigration avoided slave soil 
as if by instinct. So late as 1880 the census reports 
that the Southern States, except Florida, Louisiana, and 
Texas, are " practically without any foreign element " 5 
but it was only in 1850-60 that this differentiating 
circumstance began to show itself plainly. And, as 
the sections began to differ further in aims and policy, 
the north began to gain heavily in ability to ensure its 
success. 

237. Texas was the last slave State ever admitted ; 
and, as it refused to be divided, the south had no further 
increase of numbers in the senate. Until jhe sections in 
1850 the admission of a free State had been Congress. 
so promptly balanced by the admission of a slave State 
that the senators of the two sections had remained about 
equal in number ; in 1860 the free States had 36 sena- 
tors, and the slave States only 30. As the representation 
in the house had changed from 35 free State and 30 
slave State members in 1790 to 147 free State and 90 
slave State in 1860, and as the electors are the sum of 
the numbers of senators and representatives, it is evident 
that political power had passed away from the south in 



194 THE UNITED STATES. 

1850. If at any time the free States should unite they 
could control the house of representatives and the senate, 
elect the President and Vice-President, dictate the ap- 
pointment of judges and other Federal officers, and make 
the laws what they pleased. If pressed to it, they could 
even control the interpretation of the laws by the Su- 
preme Court. No Federal judge could be removed except 
by impeachment (§ 121), but an Act of Congress could 
at any time increase the number of judges to any extent, 
and the appointment of the additional judges could reverse 
the opinion of the court. All the interests of the south 
depended on the one question whether the free States 
would unite or not. 

238. In circumstances so critical a cautious quiescence 
and avoidance of public attention was the only safe course 

Tendencies to for tlic "slavc powcr," but that course had 
disunion, become impossible. The numbers interested 
had become too large to be subject to complete discipline ; 
all could not be held in cautious reserve ; and, when an 
advanced proposal came from any quarter of the slave- 
holding lines, the .whole army was shortly forced up to 
the advanced position. Every movement of the mass 
was necessarily aggressive; and aggression meant final 
collision. If collision came, it must be on some question 
of the rights of the States ; and on such a question the 
whole south would move as one man. Everything thus 
tended to disunion. 

239. The Protestant churches of the United States had 
reflected in their organization the spirit of the political 

Sectarian divis- institutious uudcr which they lived. Acting 

'°"- as purely voluntary associations, they had 

been organized into governments by delegates, much like 

the " conventions " which had been evolved in the politi- 



TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. 195 

cal parties (§ 203). The omnipresent slavery question 
intruded into these bodies, and split them. The Baptist 
Church was thus divided into a northern and a southern 
branch in 1845, and the equally powerful Methodist 
Church met the same fate the following year. Two of 
the four great Protestant bodies were thus no longer 
national ; it was only by the most careful management 
that the integrity of the Presbyterian Church was main- 
tained until 1861, when it also yielded; and only the 
Episcopal and Roman Catholic Churches retained their 
national character. If the process of disruption did not 
extend to other sects, it was because they were already 
mainly northern or mainly southern. 

240. The political parties showed the same tendency. 
Each began to shrivel up in one section or the other. The 
notion of "squatter sovereignty" attractive at 
first to the western democracy, and not repu- 
diated by the south, enabled the Democratic party to pass 
the crisis of 1850 without losing much of its northern 
vote, while southern Whigs began to drift in, making the 
party continually more pro-slavery. This could not con- 
tinue long without beginning to decrease its northern 
vote, but this effect did not become plainly visible until 
after 1852. The efforts of the Whig party to ignore the 
great question alienated its anti-slavery members in the 
north, while they did not satisfy its southern members. 
The Whig losses were not at first heavy, but, as the 
electoral vote of each State is determined by the barest 
plurality of the popular vote, they were enough to defeat 
the party almost everywhere in the presidential 
election of 1852. The Whigs nominated Scott 
and the Democrats Pierce; and Pierce carried all but 
four of the thirty-one States, and was elected. This 



196 THE UNITED STATES. 

revelation of hopeless weakness was the downfall of the 
Whig party ; it maintained its organization for four years 
longer, but the life had gone out of it. The future was 
with the Free-Soil party, though it had polled but few 
votes in 1852. 

241. During the administration of Taylor (and Vice- 
President Fillmore, who succeeded him) Clay, Webster, 

Changes in Calhouu, Polk, and Taylor were removed by 
leadership. (Jeath, and there was a steady drift of other 
political leaders out of public life. New men were push- 
ing in everywhere, and in both sections they showed the 
prevailing tendency to disunion. The best of them were 
unprecedentedly radical. Sumner, Seward, and Chase 
came into the senate, bringing the first accession of 
recognized force and ability to the anti-slavery feeling 
in that body. The new southern men, such as Davis, 
and the Democratic recruits from the southern Whig 
party, such as Stephens, were ready to take the ground 
on which Calhoun had always insisted, — that Congress 
was bound not merely to the negative duty of not attack- 
ing slavery in the Territories, but to the positive duty of 
protecting it. This, if it should become the general 
southern position, was certain to destroy the notion of 
squatter sovereignty (§ 226), and thus to split the Demo- 
cratic party, which was almost the last national ligament 
that now held the two fragments of the Union together. 

242. The social disintegration was as rapid. Northern 
men travelling in the south were naturally looked upon 

Social diver- with incrcasiug suspicion, and were made to 
gence. fgg} ^^^X thcy wcrc ou a soil alien in sympa- 
thies. Some of the worst phases of democracy were 
called into play in the south ; and, in some sections, law 
openly yielded supremacy to popular passion in the cases 



TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. 197 

of suspected abolitionists. Southern conventions, on all 
sorts of subjects, became common; and in these meetings, 
permeated by a dawning sense of southern nationality, 
hardly any proposition looking to southern independen-ce 
of the north was met with disfavor. In State elections a 
distinctly disunion element appeared ; and, though it was 
defeated, the majority did not deny the right of secession, 
only its expediency. 

243. Calhoun, in his last and greatest speech, called 
attention to the manner in which one tie after another 
was snapping. But he ignored the real peril Progress of dis- 
of the situation — its dangerous facts: that ""'°"' 
the south was steadily growing weaker in comparison 
with the north, and more unable to secure a wider area 
for the slave system ; that it was therefore being steadily 
forced into demanding active Congressional protection for 
slavery in the Territories ; that the north would never 
submit to this ; and that the south must submit to the 
will of the majority or bring about a collision by attempt- 
ing to secede. 

244. Anti-slavery feeling in the north was stimulated 
by the manner in which the Fugitive Slave Law (§ 228) 
was enforced immediately after 1850. The Fugitive 
chase after fugitive slaves was prosecuted in ^'^^^ '-^^• 
many cases with circumstances of revolting brutality, 
and features of the slave system which had been tacitly 
looked upon as fictitious were brought home to the heart 
of the free States. The added feeling showed Kansas- 
its force when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was Nebraska Act. 
passed by Congress (1854). It organized the two new 
Territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Both of them were 
forever free soil by the terms of the Missouri compro- 
mise (§ 197). But the success of the notion of squatter 



198 THE UNITED STATES. ■ 

sovereignty in holding the Democratic party together 
while destroying the Whig party had intoxicated Douglas 
and other northern Democrats ; and they now applied the 
doctrine to these Territories. They did not desire "to 
vote slavery up or down/' but left the decision to the 
people of the two Territories. 

245. This was the grossest political blunder in American 
history. The status of slavery had been settled, by the 
Constitution or by the compromises of 1820 or 1850, on 
every square foot of American soil ; right or wrong, the 
settlement was made. The Kansas-Nebraska Act took a 
great mass of territory out of the settlement and flung it 
into the arena as a prize for which the sections were to 
struggle ; and the struggle always tended to force, as the 
only arbiter. The first result of the Act was to throw 

The " American parties iuto chaos. An American or "Know- 
party." Nothing " party, a secret oath-bound organiza- 
tion, pledged to oppose the influence or power of foreign- 
born citizens, had been formed to take the place of the 
defunct Whig party. It had been quite successful in 
State elections for a time, and was now beginning to have 
larger aspirations. It, like the Whig party, intended to 
ignore slavery, but, after a few years of life, the questions 
complicated with slavery entered its organization and 
divided it also. Even in 1854 many of its leaders in the 
north were forced to take position against the Kansas- 
Nebraska Act, while hosts of others joined in the oppo- 
sition without any party organization. No American 
party ever rose so swiftly as this latter ; with no other 

The Republican P^rty uamc than the awkward title of "Anti- 
party. Nebraska men," it carried the Congressional 
elections of 1854 at the north, forced many of the former 
Know-Nothinof leaders into union with it, and controlled 



TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. 199 

the house of representatives of the Congress which met in 
1855. The Democratic party, which had been practically 
the only party since 1852, had now to face the latest and 
strongest of its broad-constructionist opponents, one which 
with the nationalizing features of the Federal and Whig 
parties combined democratic feelings and methods, and, 
above all, had a democratic purpose at bottom. It 
acknowledged, at first, no purpose aimed at slavery, only 
an intention to exclude slavery from the Territories ; but, 
under such principles, it was the only party which was 
potentially an anti-slavery party, the only party to which 
the enslaved laborer of the south could look with the 
faintest hope of aid in reaching the status of a man. The 
new party had grasped the function which belonged of 
right to its great opponent, and it seized with it its oppo- 
nent's original title. The name Democrat had quite taken 
the place of that first used — Republican (§ 150), but the 
latter had never passed out of popular remembrance and 
liking at the north. The new party took quick and skil- 
ful advantage of this by assuming the old name, and early 
in 1856 the two great parties of the next thirty years — 
the Democratic and Republican parties — were drawn up 
against one another. 

246. The foreign relations of the United States dur- 
ing Pierce's term of office were overshadowed by the 
domestic difficulties, but were of importance. 
In the Koszta case (1853) national protec- 
tion had been afforded on foreign soil to a person who 
had only taken the preliminary steps to naturalization. 
Japan had been opened to American inter- 
course and commerce (1854). But the ques- 
tion of slavery was more and more thrusting itself 
into foreign relations. A great southern ropublic, to 



200 THE UNITED STATES. 

be founded at first by the slave States, but to take in 
gradually the whole territory around the Gulf of Mexico 
and include the West Indies, was soon to be a pretty 
general ambition among slave-holders, and its first 
phases appeared during Pierce's administration. Efforts 
were begun to obtain Cuba from Spain ; and the three 
leading American ministers abroad, meeting at Ostend, 
Ostend mani- "L^nitcd iu dcclariug the possession of Cuba to 
festo. JQg essential to the well-being of the United 
Filibustering, gtatcs (1854). "Filibustering" expeditions 
against Cuba or the smaller South American states, in- 
tended so to revolutionize them as to lay a basis for an 
application to be annexed to the United States, became 
common, and taxed the energies of the Federal Govern- 
ment for their prevention. All these, however, yielded 
in interest and importance to the affairs in Kansas. 

247. Nebraska was then supposed to be a desert, and 
attention was directed almost exclusively to Kansas. 
No sooner had its organization left the matter 
of slavery to be decided by its " people " than 
the anti-slavery people of the north and west felt it to 
be their duty to see that the " people " of the Territory 
should be anti-slavery in sympathy. Emigrant associa- 
tions were formed, and these shipped men and families 
to Kansas, arming them for their protection in the new 
country. Southern newspapers called for similar mear- 
ures in the south, but the call was less effective. South- 
ern men without slaves, settling a new State, were un- 
comfortably apt to prohibit slavery, as in California. 
Only slave-holders were trusty pro-slavery men ; and 
such were not likely to take slaves to Kansas, and risk 
their ownership on the result of the struggle. But for 
the people of Missouri, Kansas would have been free 



Tendencies to disunion. 201 

soil at once. Lying across the direct road to Kansas, 
the Missouri settlers blockaded the way of free-state 
settlers, crossed into Kansas, and voted profusely at the 
first Territorial election. Their votes chose a Terri- 
torial legislature which gave a complete code of slave 
laws to the Territory. Passing to the north of Missouri 
the " free-state settlers " entered Kansas to find that 
their opponents had secured the first position. This 
brought out the fundamental difference between a Terri- 
tory — under the absolute control of Congress and only 
privileged in certain branches of legislation — and a 
State with complete jurisdiction over its own affairs. 
Finding themselves cut off from control of the former, 
the free-state settlers determined to attempt to substi- 
tute the latter. They organized a State Free-state gov- 
government (1855), and applied for admis- emment. 
sion by Congress. Such irregular erections of States 
had been known before ; and, though they were con- 
fessedly not binding until confirmed by Congress, the 
Democratic party had always been tender with them, 
and prone to seek a compromise with them. A symptom 
of the process which had been making the Democratic 
party pro-slavery was seen in the attitude which the 
Democratic administration now took towards the 
inchoate State of Kansas. Never thinking of compro- 
mise, it pounced on the new organization, scattered it, 
arrested its leaders, and expressed a hesitating desire 
to try them for treason (1856). Nevertheless, the free- 
state settlers gave no further obedience to the Territo- 
rial Government, as the pro-slavery settlers refused to 
recognize the pseudo-state Government, and the struggle 
passed into a real civil war, the two powers mustering 
considerable armies, fighting battles, capturing towns, 



202 THE UNITED STATES. 

and paroling prisoners. The struggle was really over in 
1857, and the south was beaten. It could not compete 
with the resources and enthusiasm of the other section ; 
its settlers were not unanimous, as their opponents were ; 
and the anti-slavery settlers were in a great majority. 
There were, however, all sorts of obstacles yet to be 
overcome before the new State of Kansas was recognized 
by Congress, after the withdrawal of the senators of the 
seceding States (1861). 

248. In the heat of the Kansas struggle came the 
presidential election of 1856. The Democrats nominated 
Buchanan, declaring, as usual, for the strictest 
' limitation of the powers of the Federal Gov- 
ernment on a number of points specified, and reaffirming 
the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act — the settle- 
ment of slavery by the people of the Territory. The 
remnant of the Whig party, including the Know-I^othings 
of the north and those southern men who wished no 
further discussion of slavery, nominated the President 
who had gone out of office in 1853, Fillmore. The Re- 
publican party nominated Fremont ; the bulk of its 
manifesto was taken uj) with protests against attempts 
to introduce slavery into the Territories ; but it showed 
its broad-construction tendencies by declaring for appro- 
priations of public moneys for internal improvements. 
The Democrats were successful in electing Buchanan; 
but the position of the party was quite different from the 
triumph with which it had come out of the election of 
1852. It was no longer master of twenty-seven of the 
thirty-one States ; all New England and New York, 
all the north-west, but Indiana and Illinois, all the free 
States but five, had gone against it ; its candidate no 
longer had a majority of the popular vote, but was chosen 



TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. 203 

by a majority of the electoral votes ; and it had before it 
a party with nearly as many popular votes as its own, 
the control of most of the strongest section of the Union, 
and an enthusiasm which was more dangerous still. For 
the first time in the history of the country a distinctly 
anti-slavery candidate had obtained an electoral vote, and 
had even come near obtaining the presidency. Fillmore 
had carried but one State, Maryland; Buchanan had 
carried the rest of the south, with a few States in the 
north, and Fremont the rest of the north and none of the 
south. If things had gone so far that the two sections 
were to be constituted into opposing political parties, it 
was evident that the end was near. 

249. Oddly enough the constitutionality of the com- 
promise of 1820 (§ 197) had never happened to come 
before the Supreme Court for consideration, jhe Dred Scott 
In 1856-57 it came up for the first time, decision. 
One Dred Scott, a Missouri slave who had been taken 
to the territory covered by the compromise, and had 
therefore sued for his freedom, was sold to a citizen of 
another State. Scott then transferred his suit from 
the State to the Federal courts, under the power given 
to them to try suits between citizens of different States, 
and the case came by appeal to the Supreme Court. Its 
decision was announced at the beginning of Buchanan's 
administration. It put Scott out of court on the ground 
that a slave, or the descendant of slaves, could not be 
a citizen of the United States or have any standing in 
Federal courts. The opinion of the chief-justice went 
on to attack the validity of the Missouri compromise, for 
the reasons that one of the constitutional functions of 
Congress was the protection of ])roperty ; that slaves 
had been recognized as property by the Constitution; 



204 THE UNITED STATES. 

and that Congress was bound to protect, not to prohibit, 
slavery in the Territories. The mass of the northern 
people held that slaves were looked on by the Constitu- 
tion, not as property, but as " persons held to service or 
labor " by State laws ; that the constitutional function 
of Congress was the protection of liberty as well as 
property ; and that Congress was thus bound to prohibit, 
not to protect, slavery in the Territories. Another step 
in the road to disunion was thus taken, as the only 
peaceful interpreter of the Constitution was pushed out 
of the way. The north flouted the decision of the 
Supreme Court, and the storm of angry dissent which 
it aroused did the disunionists good service at the south. 
From this time the leading newspapers in the south 
maintained that the radical southern view first advanced 
by Calhoun, and but slowly accepted by other southern 
leaders, as to the duty of Congress to protect slavery 
in the Territories, had been confirmed by the Supreme 
Court; that the northern Eepublicans had rejected it; 
and that even the squatter sovereignty theory of northern 
Democrats could no longer be submitted to by the south. 

250. The population of the United States in 1S60 was 
over 31,000,000, an increase of more than 8,000,000 in 

. , . . , ten years. As the decennial increase of popu- 

Admission of _ ^ ^ _-'■-'• 

Minnesota and latiou bccamc larger, so did the divergence 
regon. ^^ ^|^^ scctious iu populatlou, and still more 
in wealth and resources. Two more free States came 
in during this period, — Minnesota (1858) and Oregon 
(1859), — and Kansas was clamoring loudly for the same 
privilege. The free and slave States, which had been 
almost equal in population in 1790, stood now as 19 to 
12. And of the 12,000,000 in slave States, the 4,000,000 
slaves and the 250,000 free blacks were not so much 



TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. ^0'6 

a factor of strength, as a possible source of weakness 
and danger. No serious slave rising had ever taken 
place in the south ; but the sudden flaming out of John 
Brown's insurrection (1859), and the alarm j^hn Brown's 
which it carried through the south, were '■^''^• 
tokens of a danger which added a new horror to the 
chances of civil war. It was not wonderful that men, 
in the hope of finding some compromise by which to 
avoid such a catastrophe, should be willing to give up 
everything but principle and even to trench sharply 
upon principle itself, nor that offers of compromise 
should urge southern leaders farther into the fatal belief 
that " the north would not fight." 

251. Northern Democrats, under the lead of Douglas, 
had been forced already almost to the point of revolt by 
the determination of southern senators to prevent the 
admission of Kansas as a free State, if not to secure 
her admission as a slave State. When the ^. . , 

Division of 

Democratic convention of 1860 met at Charles- the Democratic 
ton, the last strand of the last national polit- ''^^^' 
ical organization parted ; the Democratic party itself 
was split at last by the slavery question. The southern 
delegates demanded a declaration in favor of the duty 
of Congress to protect slavery in the Territories. It 
was all that the Douglas Democrats could then do to 
maintain themselves in a few northern States ; such a 
declaration meant political suicide everywhere, and they 
voted it down. The convention divided into two bodies. 
The southern body adjourned to Richmond, and the 
northern and border State convention to Baltimore. 
Here the northern delegates, by seating some delegates 
friendly to Douglas, provoked a further secession of 
border State delegates, who, in company with the Rich- 



206 THE UNITED STATES. 

mond body, nominated Breckinridge and Lane for Pres- 
ident and Vice-President. The remainder of the original 
convention nominated Douglas and H. V. Johnson. 

252. The remnant of the old Whig and Know-Nothing 
parties, now calling itself the Constitutional Union party, 

/- XX X. 1 met at Baltimore and nominated Bell and 

Constitutional 

Union party. Evcrctt. Thc Ecpublican convention met at 
Republican Chicago. Its " platf orm " of 1856 had been 
^^^^' somewhat broad constructionist in its nature 
and leanings, but a strong Democratic element in the 
party had prevented it from going too far in this direc- 
tion. The election of 1856 had shown that, with the 
votes of Pennsylvania and Illinois, the party would then 
have been successful, and the Democratic element was 
now ready to take almost anything which would secure 
the votes of these States. This state of affairs will go to 
explain the nomination of Lincoln of Illinois, for Presi- 
dent, with Hamlin, a former Democrat, for Vice-Presi- 
dent, and the declaration of the platform in favor of a 
protective tariff. The mass of the platform was still 
devoted to the necessity of excluding slavery from the 
Territories. To sum up : the Bell party wished to have 
no discussion of slavery ; the Douglas Demo- 

The parties -^ ' ° 

and slavery in the crats TCstcd ou squattcr sovcrciguty and the 
erri ones, compromise of 1850, but would accept the 
decision of the Supreme Court; the Republicans de- 
manded that Congress should legislate for the prohibition 
of slavery in the Territories ; and the southern Demo- 
crats demanded that Congress should legislate for the 
protection of slavery in the Territories. 

253. No candidate received a majority of the popular 
vote, Lincoln standing first and Douglas second. But 
Lincoln and Hamlin had a clear majority of the elec- 



TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. 207 

toral vote, and so were elected, Breckinridge and Lane 
coming next. It is worthy of mention that, up to the last 
hours of Lincoln's first term of office, Congress 

' ^ Election of I860. 

would always have contained a majority op- 
posed to him but for the a,bsence of the members from 
the seceding States. The interests of the south and even 
of slavery were thus safe enough under an anti-slavery 
President. But the drift of events was too plain. Nulli- 
fication had come and gone, and the nation feared it no 
longer. Even secession by a single State was now almost 
out of the question ; the letters of southern governors in 
1860, in consultation on the state of affairs, agree that 
no State would secede without assurances of support by 
others. If this crisis were allowed to slip by without 
action, even a sectional secession would soon be impos- 
sible. If secession were a right, it must be asserted now 
or never. 

254. Some assurance of united action must have been 
obtained, for South Carolina ventured into secession. 
The Democratic revolution which, since 1829, 
had compelled the legislatures to give the 
choice of presidential electors (§ 119) to the people of 
the States had not effected South Carolina ; her electors 
were still chosen by the legislature. That body, on the 
election day of November, 1860, having chosen the State's 
electors, remained in session until the telegraph had 
brought assurances that Lincoln had secured a sufficient 
number of electors to ensure his election ; it then sum- 
moned a State convention and adjourned. The State 
convention, which is a legislative body chosen for a 
special purpose, met December 20, and unanimously 
passed an "ordinance of secession," repealing the Acts 
by which the State had ratified the Constitution and its 



208 THE UNI f ED STATES. 

amendments (§ 108), and dissolving "the Union now 
subsisting between South Carolina and other States, 
under the name of the United States of America." The 
convention took all steps necessary to make the State 
ready for war, and adjourned. Similar ordinances were 
passed by conventions in Mississippi (January 9, 1861), 
Florida (January 10), Alabama (January 11), Georgia 
(January 18), Louisiana (January 23), and Texas (Feb- 
ruary 1). 

255. The opposition in the south did not deny the 
right to secede, but the expediency of its exercise. 
The argument Their cffort was to elect delegates to the 
for secession, gtatc convcutions who would vote not to 
secede. They were beaten, says A. H. Stephens, by the 
cry that the States " could make better terms out of the 
Union than in it." That is, the States were to with- 
draw individually, suspend the functions of the Federal 
Government within their jurisdiction for the time, con- 
sider maturely any proposals for guaranties for their 
rights in the Union, and return as soon as satisfactory 
guaranties should be given. A second point to be noted 
is the difference between the notions of a State con- 
vention prevalent in the north and in the 

Action -*■ 

at the State con- soutli. The Northern State convention was 
ventions. generally considered as a preliminary body, 
whose action was not complete or valid until ratified by 
a popular vote. The Southern State convention was 
looked upon as the incarnation of the sovereignty of the 
State, and its action was not supposed to need a popular 
ratification. When the conventions of the seceding 
States had adopted the ordinances of secession, they 
proceeded to other business. They appointed delegates, 
who met at Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, Feb- 



TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. 209 

ruary 4, fornied a provisional Constitution for the " Con- 
federate States," chose a provisional President and Vice- 
President (Jefferson Davis and A. H. Stephens), and 
established an army, treasury, and other exec-jhe "Confeder- 
utive departments. The President and Vice- ^^^ states." 
President were inaugurated February 18. The permanent 
Constitution, adopted in March, was copied from that of 
the United States, with variations meant to maintain 
State sovereignty, to give the cabinet seats in Congress, 
to prevent the grant of bounties or any protective feat- 
ures in the tariff or the maintenance of internal im23rove- 
ments at general expense, and to "recognize and protect" 
" the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the 
Confederate States." 

256. Under what claim of constitutional right all this 
was done passes comprehension. That a State conven- 
tion should have the final power of decision constitutional 
on the question which it was summoned to '^'s'^^^- 
consider is quite as radical doctrine as has yet been 
heard of; that a State convention, summoned to con- 
sider the one question of secession, should go on, with 
no appeal to any further popular authority or mandate, 
to send delegates to meet those of other States and form 
a new national Government, which could only exist by 
warring on the United States, is a novel feature in 
American constitutional law. It was revolution or 
nothing. Only in Texas, where the call of the State 
convention was so irregular that a popular vote could 
hardly be escaped, was any popular vote allowed. 
Elsewhere, the functions of the voter ceased when he 
voted for delegates to the State convention; he could 
only look on helplessly while that body went on to 
constitute him a citizen of a new nation of which he had 
not dreamed when he voted. 



210 THE UNITED STATES. 

257. The border States were in two tiers — North 
Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, next to the seceding 

The border States, and Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, 
States. Kentucky, and Missouri next to the free 
States. None of these were willing to secede. There 
was, however, one force which might draw them into 
secession. A State which did not wish to secede, but 
believed in State sovereignty and the abstract right of 
secession, would be inclined to take up arms to resist 
any attempt by the Federal G-overnment to coerce a 
seceding State. In this way, in the following spring, 
the original seven seceding States, were reinforced by 
four of the border States (§ 267), making their final 
number eleven. 

258. In the nojth and west surprisingly little atten- 
tion was given to the systematic course of procedure 

Feeling in the aloug the Grulf. The pcoplc of thcsc scctious 
north. were very busy ; they had heard much of this 
talk before, and looked upon it as a kind of stage-thunder, 
the inevitable accompaniment of recent presidential elec- 
tions ; and they expected the difficulty to be settled in 
some way. Republican politicians, with the exception 
of a few, were inclined to refrain from public declara- 
tions of intention. Some of them, such as Seward, 
showed a disposition to let the " erring sisters " depart 
in peace, expecting to make the loss good by accessions 
from Canada. A few, like Chandler, believed that there 
would be "blood-letting," but most of them were still 
doubtful as to the future. Democratic politicians were 
hide-bound by their repetition of the phrase " voluntary 
Union " (§ 180) ; they had not yet hit upon the theory 
which carried the War Democrats through the final 
struggle, that the sovereign State of New York could 



TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. 211 

make war upon tlie sovereign State of South Carolina 
for the unfriendly act of secession, and that the war was 
waged by the non-seceding against the seceding States. 
President Buchanan publicly condemned the doctrine of 
secession, though he added a confession of his inability 
to see how secession was to be prevented if a State should 
be so wilful as to attempt it. Congress did nothing, 
except to admit Kansas as a free State and ,^ . . 

■•■ Admission of 

adopt the protective Morrill tariff (§ 276) ; Kansas. 
even after its members from the seceding States Morriii tariff of 
had withdrawn, those who remained made no 
preparations for conflict, and, at their adjournment in 
March, 1861, left the Federal Government naked and 
helpless before its enemies. 

259. The only sign of life in the body politic, the 
half-awakened word of warning from the democracy of 
the north and west, was its choice of governors of States. 
A remarkable group of men, soon to be known as the 
" war governors," — Washburn of Maine, Fair- j^^ „ ^a^ gov- 
banks of Vermont, Goodwin of New Hamp- emors." 
shire, Andrew of Massachusetts, Sprague of Rhode Island, 
Buckingham of Connecticut, Morgan of New York, Olden 
of New Jersey, Curtin of Pennsylvania, Dennison of Ohio, 
Morton of Indiana, Yates of Illinois, Blair of Michigan, 
Randall of Wisconsin, Kirkwood of Iowa, and Ramsey 
of Minnesota, — held the executive powers of the North- 
ern States in 1861-62. Some of these governors, such as 
Andrew and Buckingham, as they saw the struggle come 
nearer, went so far as "to order the purchase of warlike 
material for their States on their private responsibility, 
and their action saved days of time. And at all times 
they were admirably prompt, methodical, clear-sighted, 
and intensely devoted to their one duty. 



212 THE UNITED STATES. 

260. The little army of the United States had been 
almost put out of consideration; wherever its detach- 
ments could be found in the south they were surrounded 
and forced to surrender and to be transferred to the 
north. After secession^ and in some of the States even 
before it, the forts, arsenals, mints, custom-houses, ship- 
yards, and public property of the United States had been 

, seized by the authority of the State, and these 

Seizure of . 

United States wcrc held uutil transferred to the new Con- 

property. federate States organization. In the first two 

months of 1861 the authority of the United States was 

paralyzed in seven States, and in at least seven more 

its future authority seemed of very doubtful duration. 

261. Only a few forts, of all the magnificent structures 
with which the nation had dotted the southern coast, 

Position of the remained to it — the forts near Key West, 
remaining forts. ]?ortress Mouroc at thc mouth of Chesapeake 
Bay, Fort Pickens at Pensacola, and Fort Sumter in 
Charleston harbor. Both the last-named were beleaguered 
by hostile batteries, but the administration of President 
Buchanan, intent on maintaining the peace until the new 
administration should come in, instructed their command- 
ing ofiicers to refrain from any acts tending to open con- 
flict. The Federal officers, therefore, were obliged to 
look idly on while every preparation was made for their 
destruction, and even while a vessel bearing supplies for 
Fort Sumter was driven back by the batteries between it 
and the sea. 

262. The divergence between the two sections of the 
country had thus passed into disunion, and was soon to 
Slavery and dis- P'^ss iuto opcu liostility. Thc legal recogni- 

union. ^JQ^-^ Qf ^]-^g custom of slavcry, acting upon and 
reacted upon by every step in their economic development 



TENDENCIES TO DISUNION. 213 

and every difference in their natural characteristics, sur- 
roundings, and institutions, had carried north and south 
further and faster apart, until the elements of a distinct 
nationality had appeared in the latter. Slavery had had 
somewhat the same effect on the south that democracy 
had had on the colonies. In the latter case the aristoc- 
racy of the mother country had made a very feeble 
struggle to maintain the unity of its empire. It remained 
to be seen, in the American case, whether democracy 
would do better. 



214 THE UNITED STATES. 



THE CIVIL WAR. 

1861-65. 

263. Secession had taken away many of the men who 
had for years managed the Federal Government, and who 
understood its workings. Lincoln's party was in power 
for the first time ; his officers were new to the routine of 
Federal administration ; and the circumstances with which 
they were called upon to deal were such as to daunt any 

r- , , spirit. The Government had become so nearly 

Embarrassmerrts X J 

of the bankrupt in the closing days of Buchanan's 
administration that it had only escaped by 
paying double interest, and that by the special favor of 
the New York banks, which obtained in return the ap- 
pointment of Dix as secretary of the treasury. The army 
had been almost broken up by the captures of men and 
material and by resignations of competent and trusted 
officers. The navy had come to such a pass that, in Feb- 
ruary, 1861, a house committee reported that only two 
vessels, one of twenty, the other of two guns, were avail- 
able for the defence of the entire Atlantic coast. And, 
to complicate all difficulties, a horde of clamorous office- 
seekers crowded Washington. 

264. Before many weeks of Lincoln's administration 
had passed, the starting of an expedition to provision 
Fort Sumter brought on an attack by the batteries around 



THE CIVIL WAR. 215 



the fort, and, after a bombardment of thirty-six hours, 
the fort surrendered (April 14, 1861). It is Surrender of 
not necessary to rehearse the familiar story R°fn^'j^jhe 
of the outburst of feeling which followed this north. 
event and the proclamation of President Lincoln calling 
for volunteers, the mustering of men, the eagerness of 
States, cities, and villages to hurry volunteers forward 
and to supply money to their own Government in its 
need. The 75,000 volunteers called for were supplied 
three or four times over, and those who were refused felt 
the refusal as a personal deprivation. 

265. There had been some belief in the south that the 
north-west would take no part in the impending conflict, 
and that its people could be persuaded to keep 

up friendly relations with the new nationality 
until the final treaty of peace should establish all the 
fragments of the late Union upon an international basis. 
In the spring months of 1861 Douglas, who had been 
denounced as the tool of the southern slave-holders, was 
spending the closing dajss of life in expressing the deter- 
mination of the north-west that it would never submit to 
have "a line of custom-houses " between it and the ocean. 
The batteries which Confederate authority was erecting 
on the banks of the Mississippi were fuel to the flame. 
Far-off California, which had been considered neutral by 
all parties, pronounced as unequivocally for the national 
authority. 

266. The shock of arms put an end to opposition in 
the south as well. The peculiar isolation of life in the 
Bouth precluded the more ignorant voter from -Following the 
any comparisons of the power of his State states." 
with any other ; to him it was almost inconceivable that 
his State should own or have a superior. The better 



216 THE UNITED STATES. 



educated men, of wider experience, had been trained to 
think State sovereignty the foundation of civil liberty, 
and, when their State spoke, they felt bound to " follow 
their State.'' The President of the Confederate States 
issued his call for men, and it was also more than met. 
On both sides of the line armed men were hurrying to 
a meeting. 

267. Lincoln's call for troops met with an angry re- 
ception wherever the doctrine of State sovereignty had 

The border ^ foothold. The govcmors of the border 
s^^^®'- States (§ 257) generally returned it with a 
refusal to furnish any troops. Two States, North Car- 
olina and Arkansas, seceded and joined the Confederate 
States. In two others, Virginia and Tennessee, the 
State politicians formed "military leagues" with the 
Confederacy, allowing Confederate troops to take pos- 
session of the States, and then submitted the question 
of secession to " popular vote." The secession of these 
States was thus accomplished, and Richmond became the 
Confederate capital. The same process was attempted 
in Missouri, but failed, and the State remained loyal. 
The politician class in Maryland and Kentucky took the 
extraordinary course of attempting to maintain neu- 
trality ; but the growing power of the Federal Gov- 
ernment soon enabled the people of the two States to 
resume control of their governments and give consistent 
support to the Union. Kentucky, however, had troops 
in the Confederate armies ; and one of her citizens, the 
late Vice-President, John C. Breckinridge, left his place 
in the senate and became an officer in the Confederate 
service. Delaware cast her lot from the first with the 
Union. 

268. The first blood of the war was shed in the streets 



THE CIVIL WAR. 217 



of Baltimore, when a mob attempted to stop Massa- 
chusetts troops on their way to Washington 
(April 19). For a time there was difficulty 
in getting troops through Maryland because of the 
active hostility of a part of its people, but this was 
overcome, and the national capital was made secure. 
The Confederate lines had been pushed up to Manassas 
Junction, about thirty miles from Washington. When 
Congress, called into special session by the President for 
July 4, came together, the outline of the Confederate 
States had been fixed. Their line of defence held the 
left bank of the Potomac from Fortress Monroe nearly 
to Washington ; thence, at a distance of some thirty 
miles from the river, to Harpers Ferry ; thence through 
the mountains of western Virginia and the southern part 
of Kentucky, crossing the Mississippi a little below 
Cairo ; thence through southern Missouri to the eastern 
border of Kansas; and thence south-west through the 
Indian Territory and along the northern boundary of 
Texas to the Eio Grande. The length of the line, in- 
cluding also the Atlantic and Grulf coasts, has been 
estimated at 11,000 miles. The territory within it com- 
prised about 800,000 square miles, with a population of 
over 9,000,000 and great natural resources. Its cotton 
was almost essential to the manufactories of the world ; 
in exchange for it every munition of war could be pro- 
cured ; and it was hardly possible to blockade 
a coast over 3000 miles in length, on which 
the blockading force had but one port of refuge, and 
that about the middle of the line. Nevertheless Presi- 
dent Lincoln issued his proclamation announcing the 
blockade of the southern coast, a proclamation from 
President Davis appearing with it, offering letters of 



218 THE UNITED STATES. 

marque and reprisal against the commerce of the United 
States to private vessels. The news brought out proc- 
lamations of neutrality from Great Britain and France, 
and, according to subsequent decisions of the Supreme 
Court, made the struggle a civil war, though the minority 
held that this did not occur legally until the Act of 
Congress of July 13, 1861, authorizing the President, in 
case of insurrection, to shut up ports and suspend com- 
mercial intercourse with the inhabitants of the revolted 
district. 

269. The President found himself compelled to assume 
powers never granted to the executive authority, trusting 
to the subsequent action of Congress to validate his action. 
He had to raise and support armies and navies ; he even 
had to authorize seizures of necessary property, of rail- 
road and telegraph lines, arrests of suspected persons, and 

Suspension of ^^^ suspcusiou of the Writ of habeas corpus in 
habeas corpus, certain districts. Congress supported him, 
and proceeded in 1863 to give the President power to 
suspend the writ anywhere in the United States, which 
he proceeded to do (§ 115). The Supreme Court, after 
the war, decided that no branch of the Government had 
power to suspend the writ in districts where the courts 
were open, — that i\\Q privilege of the writ might be sus- 
pended as to persons properly involved in the war, but 
that the writ was still to issue, the court deciding whether 
the person came within the classes to whom the suspen- 
sion applied. This decision, however, did not come until 
" arbitrary arrests,'" as they were called, had been a feature 
of the entire war. A similar suspension of the writ took 
place in the Confederate States. 

270. When Congress met (July 4, 1861), the absence 
of southern members had made it heavily Eepublican. 



THE CIVIL WAR. 219 



It decided to consider no business but that connected 
with the war, authorized a loan and the raising of 500,000 
volunteers, and made confiscation of property 
a penalty of rebellion. While it was in 
session the first serious battle of the war — 
Bull Run, or Manassas — took place (July 21), and 
resulted in the defeat of the Federal army. Both ar- 
mies were as yet so ill-trained that the victors gained 
nothing from their success. In the west the 
battle of Wilson's Creek, near Springfield, Mo. 
(August 10), was either a drawn battle or a Confederate 
victory ; but here also the victors rather lost than gained 
ground after it. The captures of Fort Hatteras, ^^^^^^^^ ^^^ 
N. C. (August 29), and Port Royal, S. C. Port Royai. 
(November 7), gave the blockading fleets two The "Trent 
important harbors of refuge. The over-zealous ^^^^' 
action of a naval officer in taking the Confederate envoys 
Mason and Slidell out of a British mail-steamer sailing 
between two neutral ports almost brought about a col- 
lision between the United States and Great Britain in 
November. But the American precedents were all 
against the United States (§ 172), and the envoys were 
given up. 

271. General McClellan, in the early months of the 
war, had led a force of western troops across the 
Ohio river, entered western Virginia, and Army of the 
beaten the Confederate armies in several Potomac, 
battles. After the battle of Bull Run he was called to 
Washington and put in command of all the armies on 
the retirement of Scott. His genius for organization, 
and the unbounded confidence of the people in him, 
enabled him to form the troops at and near Washington 
into the first great army of the war — the army of the 



220 THE UNITED STATES. 

Potomac. It was held, however, too much in idleness to 
suit the eagerness of the people and the administration ; 
and the dissatisfaction grew louder as the winter of 
1861-62 passed away without any forward movement 
(§284). 

272. If the army was idle, Congress was not. The 
broad-construction tendencies of the party showed them- 
selves more plainly as the war grew more serious ; there 
was an increasing disposition to cut every knot by legis- 
lation, with less regard to the constitutionality of the 

legislation. A paper currency, commonlv 

Paper currency. ^ i i ,, \ 

known as "green-backs," was adopted and 
^'''"'^' made legal tender (February 2^, 1862). The 
first symptoms of a disposition to attack slavery ap- 
peared : slavery was prohibited in the District of Colum- 
bia and the Territories; the army was forbidden to 
surrender escaped slaves to their owners : and slaves of 
insurgents were ordered to be confiscated. In addition 
to a Homestead Act, giving public lands to actual settlers 
at reduced rates (§ 200), Congress began a further devel- 
opment of the system of granting public lands to railway 
corporations. 

273. The railway system of the United States was but 
twenty years old in 1850 (§ 230), but it had become to 

assume some consistency. The day of short 

Railways in 1850. , ,. _, ,. '^^ . , , , 

ana disconnected lines had passed, and the 
connections which were to develop into railway systems 
had appeared. Consolidation of smaller companies had 
begun ; the all-rail route across the State of New York 
was made up of more than a dozen original companies at 
its consolidation in 1853. The Erie railway was formed 
in 1851; and another western route — the Pennsylvania 
— was formed in 1854. These were at least the germs 



THE CIVIL WAR. 221 



of great trunk lines (§ 312). The cost of American rail- 
ways has been only from one-half to one-fourth of the 
cost of European railways ; but an investment in a far 
western railway in 1850-60 was an extra-hazardous risk. 
Not only did social conditions make any form of business 
hazardous ; the new railway often had to enter a terri- 
tory bare of population, and there create its own towns, 
farms, and traffic. Whether it could do so was so doubt- 
ful as to make additional inducements to capital neces- 
sary. The means attempted by Congress in 1850, in the 
case of the Illinois Central Eailroad, was to 
grant public lands to the corporation, reserv- 
ing to the United States the alternate sections. The 
expectation was that the railway, for the purpose of 
building up traffic, would sell lands to actual settlers at 
low rates, and that the value of the reserved lands would 
thus be increased. At first grants were made to the 
States for the benefit of the corporations ; the Act of 
1862 made the grant directly to the corporation. 

274. The vital military and political necessity of an 
immediate railway connection with the Pacific coast was 
hardly open to doubt in 1862 ; but the neces- jhe Pacific 
sity hardly justified the terms which were railways. 
offered and taken. The Union Pacific Eailroad was in- 
corporated ; the United States Government was to issue 
to it bonds ; on the completion of each forty miles, to the 
amount of ^16,000 per mile, to be a first mortgage ; 
through Utah and Nevada, the aid was to be doubled, 
and for some 300 miles of mountain building to be 
trebled; and, in addition to this, alternate sections of 
land were granted. The land-grant system, thus begun, 
was carried on in the cases of a large number of other 
roads, the largest single grants being those of 47,000,000 



222 THE UNITED STATES. 

acres to the Northern Pacific (1864) and of 42,000,000 
to the Atlantic and Pacific line (1866). 

275. Specie payments had been suspended almost 
everywhere towards the end of 1861 ; but the price of 

gold was but 102.5 at the beginning of 1862. 

Prices in paper. . i j. 1\^ -i. • • i 

About May its price m paper currency began 
to rise. It touched 170 during the next year, and 285 in 
1864; but the real price probably never went much 
above 250. As gold rose, specie disappeared. Other 
articles felt the influence in currency prices. Mr. D. A. 
Wells, in 1866, estimated that prices and rents had risen 
ninety per cent, since 1861, while wages had not risen 
more than sixty per cent. 

276. The duties on imports were driven higher than 
the Morrill tariff had ever contemplated (§ 258). The 

^ .^ _, average rates, which had been eighteen per 

Tariff and o 7 or 

internal revenue ccut. Oil dutiable ai'ticlcs and twclvc per cent. 
taxation. ^^ ^^^^ aggregate in 1860-61, rose, before the 
end of the war, to nearly fifty per cent, on dutiable 
articles and thirty-five per cent, on the aggregate. 
Domestic manufactures sprang into new life under such 
hothouse encouragement; every one who had spare 
wealth converted it into manufacturing capital. The 
probability of such a result had been the means of 
getting votes for an increased tariff; free-traders had 
voted for it as well as protectionists. For the tariff was 
only a means of getting capital into positions in which 
taxation could be applied to it, and the "internal 
revenue" taxation was merciless beyond precedent. The 
annual increase of wealth from capital was then about 
^550,000,000 ; the internal revenue taxation on it rose 
in 1866 to $310,000,000, or nearly sixty per cent. Even 
after the war the taxation was kept up unflinchingly, 



THE CIVIL WAR. 223 



until the reduction of the national debt had brought it 
to a point where it was evidently at the mercy of time 
(§ 322). 

277. The stress of all this upon the poor must have 
been great, but it was relieved in part by the bond 
system on which the war was conducted 
(§ 322). While the armies and navies were 
shooting off large blocks of the crops of 1880 or 1890, 
work and wages were abundant for all who were compe- 
tent for them. It is true, then, that the poor paid most 
of the cost of the war ; it is also true that the poor had 
shared in that anticipation of the future which had been 
forced on the country, and that, when the drafts on the 
future came to be redeemed, it was done mainly by taxa- 
tion on luxuries. The destruction of a northern railroad 
meant more work for northern iron mills and their 
workmen. The destruction of a southern road was an 
unmitigated injury ; it had to be made good at once, by 
paper issues ; the south could make no drafts on the 
future, by bond issues, for the blockade had put cotton 
out of the game, and southern bonds were hardly salable. 
Every expense had to be met by paper issues ; paper issues in 
each issue forced prices higher ; every rise in ^*^® ^°^^^- 
prices called for an increased issue of paper, with 
increased effects for evil. A Rebel War-Cler¥s Diary 
gives the following as the prices in the Eichmond 
market for May, 1864: "Boots, two hundred dollars; 
coats, three hundred and fifty dollars; pantaloons, one 
hundred dollars ; shoes, one hundred and twenty-five 
dollars ; flour, two hundred and seventy-five dollars per 
barrel ; meal, sixty to eighty dollars per bushel ; bacon, 
nine dollars per pound; no beef in market; chickens, 
thirty dollars per pair ; shad, twenty dollars ; potatoes, 



224 THE UNITED STATES. 

twenty-five dollars per bushel; turnip greens, four 
dollars per peck ; white beans, four dollars per quart or 
one hundred and twenty dollars per bushel; butter, 
fifteen dollars per pound ; lard same ; wood, fifty dollars 
per cord.'^ How the rise in salaries and wages, always 
far slower than other prices, could meet such prices as 
these, one must be left to imagine. It can only be said 
that most of the burden was really sustained by the 
women of the south. 

278. The complete lack of manufactures told heavily 
against the south from the beginning. As men were 

drawn from agriculture in the -north and 

Manufactures. , j i • t t i j> i i 

west, the increased demand tor labor was 
shaded off into an increased demand for agricultural 
machinery (§ 231) ; every increased percentage of power 
in reaping-machines liberated so many men for service 
at the front. The reaping-machines of the south — the 
slaves — were incapable of any such improvement, and, 
besides, required the presence of a portion of the pos- 
sible fighting-men at home to watch them. There is 
an evident significance in the exemption from military 
duty in the Confederate States of " one agriculturist on 
such farm, where there is no white male adult not liable 
to duty, employing fifteen able-bodied slaves between 
ten and fifty years of age." But, to the honor of the 
enslaved race, no insurrection took place. 

279. The pressing need for men in the army made the 
Confederate Congress utterly unable to withstand the 

Confederate gi'owth of exccutivc powcr. Its bills wcrc 
Congress and prepared by the cabinet, and the action of 
Congress was quite perfunctory. The suspen- 
sion of the writ of habeas corpus, and the vast powers 
granted to President Davis, or assumed by him under the 



THE CIVIL WAR. 225 



plea of military necessity, with, the absence of a watchful 
and well-informed public opinion, made the Confederate 
Government by degrees almost a despotism. It was not 
until the closing months of the war that the expiring 
Confederate Congress mustered up courage enough, to 
oppose the President's will. The organized and even radi- 
cal opposition to the war in the north, the meddlesomeness 
of Congress and its " committees on the conduct of the 
war," were no doubt unpleasant to Lincoln ; but they 
carried the country through the crisis without the effects 
visible in the south. 

280. Another Act of Federal legislation — the National 
Bank Act — should be mentioned here, as it was closely 
connected with the sale of bonds (February National bank- 
25, 1863). The banks were to be organized, '"s system. 
and, on depositing United States bonds at Washington, 
were to be permitted to issue notes up to ninety per cent, 
of the value of the bonds deposited. As the redemption 
of the notes is thus assured, they circulate without ques- 
tion all over the United States. By a subsequent Act 
the remaining State bank circulation was taxed out of 
existence. The national banks are still in operation; but 
the disappearance of United States bonds threatens their 
continuance. 

281. At the beginning of 1862 the lines of demarcation 
between the two powers had become plainly marked. The 
western part of Virginia had separated itself Admission of 
from the parent State, and was admitted as a ^^'^ Virginia. 
State (1863) under the name of West Virginia. It was 
certain that Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri 
had been saved to the Union, and that the battle was 
to be fought out in the territory to the south of them. 
In the west Grant, commanding a part of Buell's gen- 



226 THE UNITED STATES. 

eral forces, moved up the Tennessee river and broke the 
centre of the long Confederate line by the capture of 
Forts Henry and Forts Hcmy and Douclsou (February, 1862). 

Doneison. ^]^g collapse of the Confederate line opened 
the way for the occupation of almost all western Ten- 
nessee, including its capital, and the theatre of war was 
moved far forward to the southern boundary of the State, 
an advance of fully 200 miles into the heart of the Con- 
federacy. It had been shown already that the successful 
officers were to be those from West Point ; but even they 
were getting their first experience in the handling of 
large masses of men. Grant and Sherman owed a part of 
that experience to the military genius of the Confederate 
commander, Albert S. Johnston, whose sudden attack on 

Pittsburgh their army at Pittsburgh Landing (April 6) 

Landing, brouglit ou thc first great battle of the war. 
The Federal forces held out stubbornly until the arrival 
of Buell's advance guard relieved the pressure, and the 
Confederates were driven back to Corinth, with the 
heavy loss of their commander, who had been mortally 
wounded. Steady advances brought the Union armies to 
Corinth, an important railroad centre, in June ; 
and the Mississippi was opened up as far as 
Memphis by these successes of the armies and by the 
hard fighting of the gunboats at Island Number Ten and 
other places. At the northern boundary of the State of 
Mississipjoi the Union advance stopped for a time, but 
what had been gained was held. 

282. At the same time the Mississippi was opened in 
part from below. A great naval expedition under Far- 
ragut and Porter, with a land force under Butler, sailing 
from Fort Monroe, came to the mouth of the Mississippi. 
Farragut ran past the forts above the mouth of the river, 



THE CIVIL WAR. 227 



sank the ironclads wliich met him, and captured New 
Orleans (April 25). The land forces then 
took possession of it and the forts, while the 
fleet cleared the river of obstacles and Confederate ves- 
sels as far as Port Hudson and Vicksburg, where the 
Confederate works were situated on bluffs too high for a 
naval attack. 

283. The energy of the combatants had already brought 
ironclad vessels to the test which they had not yet met 
elsewhere, that of actual combat. Western ingenuity had 
produced a simple and excellent type of river ironclad by 
cutting down river steamers and plating them with rail- 
road or other iron. The type needed for the rougher 
Eastern waters was different, and the Confederates con- 
verted the frigate " Merrimac," captured at The "Monitor" 
Norfolk, into an ironclad of a more sea-going ^"^ "Merrimac." 
type. The battle between her and the '' Monitor " (March 
8), in Hampton Koads, was indecisive ; but the " Merri- 
mac " was driven back to Norfolk, the blockade and the 
cities of the Atlantic coast, which had seemed to be at 
its mercy, were saved, and the day of wooden war-vessels 
was seen to be over. Before the end of the following 
year there were 75 ironclads in the United States navy ; 
the number of vessels had increased to 588, with 4443 
guns, and 35,000 men. 

284. The hundred miles between Washington and Eich- 
mond are crossed by numberless streams, flowing south- 
east, and offering strong defensive positions, of The peninsula 
which the Confederates had taken advantage, cannpaign. 
McClellan (§ 271) therefore wished to move his army to 
Fort Monroe and attack Richmond from that point, on 
the ground of Cornwallis's campaign of 1781. He be- 
lieved that such a movement would force the Confederate 



228 THE UNITED STATES. 

armies away from Wasliington to meet him. The adminis- 
tration, believing that such a movement would only open 
the way for the enemy to capture Washington — a more 
valuable prize than Eichmond — gave directions that a 
part of McClellan's force, under McDowell, should take 
the overland route as far as Fredericksburg, while the 
rest, under McClellan, were moving up the peninsula 
towards Eichmond, and that, as the enemy withdrew to 
meet the latter, a junction of the two divisions should 
take place, so as to carry out McClellan's plans without 
uncovering Washington. But a month was spent in be- 
sieging Yorktown ; when the attempt was made to form 
the junction with McDowell it involved the separation of 
the two wings by the little river Chickahominy ; and in 
May the spring rains turned the little stream into a wide 
river, and the army was divided, Joseph E. Johnston, 
the Confederate commander, at once attacked the weaker 
Seven Pines and wiug at Scvcu Piucs and Fair Oaks, but was 

Fair Oaks, bcatcu, and was himself wounded and com- 
pelled to leave the service for a time. This event gave 
his place to Eobert E. Lee, whose only military service 
in the war up to this time had been a failure in western 
Virginia. He was now to begin, in conjunction with 
Thomas J. ("Stonewall") Jackson, a series of brilliant 
campaigns. 

285. From Staunton, one hundred miles west of Eich- 
mond, the Shenandoah valley extends north-east to the 
Potomac, whence there is an easy march of 
seventy-five miles south-east to Washington. 
Jackson struck the Union forces in the valley, drove 
them to the Potomac, and excited such alarm in Wash- 
ington that McDowell's troops were hastily withdrawn 
from Fredericksburg. Having thus spoiled McClellan's 



THE CIVIL WAR. 229 



plan of junction, and taken some 40,000 men from him, 
Jackson hurried to Eichmond. Lee met him on the 
north side of the Chickahominy, and the two armies 
attacked McClellan's right wing at Gaines's Mill, and 
cut the connection between it and its base of supplies on 
the York river (June 26). Unable to reunite his wings 
and regain his base, McClellan was forced to draw his 
right wing south, and attempt to establish another base 
on the James river. Lee and Jackson followed hard on 
his retreat, and the " seven days' battles " were The " seven 
the most desperate of the war up to this ^^y^' Matties." 
time, the principal battles being those of Savage's Sta- 
tion (June 29), Glendale (June 30), and Malvern Hill 
(July 1). The last ended the series, for McClellan had 
reached the James, and his army had fixed itself in a 
position from which it could not be driven. 

286. Pope had succeeded McDowell, and Jackson at- 
tacked and beat him on the battle-ground of Bull Eun 
(August 29), driving -his army towards Wash- pope-j 
ington. McClellan was at once recalled to campaign. 
defend the capital. As he withdrew from the peninsula, 
Lee joined Jackson, and the whole Confederate army, 
passing to the north-west of Washington, began the first 
invasion of the north. As it passed through the moun- 
tains of north-western Maryland, the army of the Poto- 
mac, which had been brought up through Maryland in 
pursuit, reached its rear, and forced it to turn and fight 
the battle of Antietam, or Sharpsburg, Sep- 
tember 17. Both sides claimed the victory, 
but Lee was compelled to recross the Potomac to his 
former position. McClellan was blamed for the slow- 
ness of his pursuit and was removed, Burnside becom- 
ing his successor. The only great event of his term 



230 THE UNITED STATES. 

of command was his attempt to storm the heights behind 
Fredericks- Frcdericksburg (December 13) and the ter- 
•^^^g' rible slaughter of his defeat. Hooker was 
then put in his place. The year 1862 thus closed with 
the opposing armies in about the same positions as at 
the beginning of the war. 

287. At the beginning of the war the people and 
leaders of the north had not desired to interfere with 
slavery, but circumstances had been too strong for them. 
Lincoln had declared that he meant to save the Union as 
he best could, — by preserving slavery, by destroying it, 
or by destroying part and preserving part of it. Just 
The Emancipation after the battle of Antietam he issued his 
Proclamation, proclamation calling on the revolted States to 
return to their allegiance before the following January 1, 
otherwise their slaves would be declared free men. No 
State returned, and the threatened declaration was issued 
January 1, 1863. As President, Lincoln could issue no 
such declaration; as commander-in-chief of the armies 
and navies of the United States, he could issue directions 
only as to the territory within his lines ; but the Eman- 
cipation Proclamation applied only to territory outside 
of his lines. It has therefore been debated whether the 
proclamation was in reality of any force. It may fairly 
be taken as an announcement of the policy which was to 
guide the army, and as a declaration of freedom taking 
effect as the lines advanced. At all events, this was 
its exact effect. Its international importance was far 
greater. The locking up of the world's source of cotton- 
supply had been a general calamity, and the Confederate 
Government and people had steadily expected tha.f the 
English and French Governments, or at least one of 
them; would intervene in the war for the purpose of 



THE CIVIL WAR. 231 



raising the blockade and releasing the southern cotton. 
The conversion of the struggle into a crusade against 
slavery made intervention impossible for Governments 
whose peoples had now a controlling influence on their 
policy, and intelligence enough to understand the issue 
which had now been made. 

288. Confederate agents in England were numerous 
and active. Taking advantage of every loophole in the 
British Foreign Enlistment Act they built confederate 
and sent to sea the " Alabama " and " Florida," privateers. 
which for a time almost drove American commerce from 
the ocean. Whenever they were closely pursued by 
United States vessels they took refuge in neutral ports 
until a safe opportunity occurred to put to sea again. 
Another, the " Georgia," was added in 1863. All three 
were destroyed in 1864, — the " Florida " by a violation 
of Brazilian neutrality, the ^^ Georgia " after an attempt 
to transfer her to neutral owners, and the "Alabama" 
after a brief sea-fight with the "Kearsarge," off Cher- 
bourg (June 19). Confederate attempts to have iron- 
clads equipped in England and France were unsuccessful. 

289. In the west (§ 281) Bragg, now in command of 
the Confederate forces, turned the right of the Union 
line in southern Tennessee, and began an invasion of 
Kentucky about the time when Lee was beginning his 
invasion of the north. Carrying off much booty, he re- 
tired into Tennessee. Towards the end of the year Rose- 
crans moved forward from Nashville to attack him. The 
armies met at Murfreesboro', and fought a 



drawn battle during the last day of the year 
1862 and the first two days of January, 1863. The west- 
ern armies were now in four parts, — that of Rosecrans 
near Murfreesboro', that of Grant near Corinth, that of 



232 THE UNITED STATES. 

Schofield in Missouri and Arkansas, and that of Banks in 
Louisiana. The complete opening of the Mississippi 
being the great object, the burden of the work fell to 
G-rant, who was nearest the river. Vicksburg was the 
objective point, and Grant at first attempted to take it 
from the opposite or western bank of the river. Failing 
here, he moved south to a favorable point for crossing, 
and used the river fleet to transfer his army to the eastern 
bank. He was now on the Vicksburg side of 
'^ ^ "'^" the river. J. E. Johnston was north-east of 
him at Jackson, with a weaker army ; the bulk of the 
Confederate forces was at or near Vicksburg, under Pem- 
berton. Johnston wanted no siege of Vicksburg; Pember- 
ton wanted no junction with Johnston, which might cost 
him the glory of defeating Grant ; and Grant solved their 
difl&culty for them. Moving north-east he struck John- 
ston's army near Jackson, beat it, and drove it out of any 
possibility of junction. He then turned westward, fight- 
ing several sharp battles as he went, and late in May he 
had Pemberton shut up in Vicksburg. His lines were 
maintained for six weeks, and then (July 4, 1863) the 
finest Confederate army in the west surrendered. Port 
Hudson surrendered to Banks five days later : the Mis- 
Port Hudson, sissippi was opened from end to end, and the 
Opening of the Confederacy was cleft in twain. From this 
Mississippi, -time communication between the two parts of 
the Confederate States became increasingly more difiicult, 
and the transfer of supplies from the rich country west of 
the Mississippi was almost at an end. There was little 
further fighting to the west of the great river, except an 
intermittent guerilla warfare and the defeat of Banks's 
expedition against north-western Louisiana early in 1864. 
When the war ceased in the east, the isolated western 
half of the Confederacy fell with it. 



tht: civil war. 233 



290. While Grant was besieging Vicksburg, Kosecrans 
had begun to move from the eastern end of the Union 
line in Tennessee against Bragg at Chattanooga, He 
drove Bragg through the place, and a dozen miles beyond 
it, into Georgia. Here the Confederate army 

took position behind Chickamauga creek, and "^ ^mauga. 
inflicted a complete defeat upon the pursuing Union forces 
(September 19-20, 1863) . Thomas covered the rear stub- 
bornly, and secured a safe retreat into Chattanooga, but 
the possession of the mountains around the place enabled 
Bragg to cut off almost all roads of further retreat and 
establish a siege of Chattanooga. Bragg was so con- 
fident of success that he detached a part of his army, 
under Longstreet, to besiege Knoxville, in eastern Ten- 
nessee. Grant was ordered to take command at Chatta- 
nooga, and went thither, taking Sherman and others of 
the officers who had taken part in his Vicksburg campaign. 
He soon opened new routes of communication to the rear, 
supplied and reinforced his army, and began to prepare 
for the storming of the mountains before him. His as- 
saults on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Eidge (No- 
vember 23-25) were among the most dramatic , , 

^ "^ Lookout Moun- 

and successful of the war. Bragg was driven tain and Mission- 
out of all his positions and back to Dalton, ^^^ "^^^' 
where Davis was compelled by the complaints of his 
people to remove him, and appoint J. E. Johnston his 
successor. Longstreet broke up the siege of Knoxville, 
and made good his retreat across the mountains into Vir- 
ginia to join Lee. 

291. The army of the Potomac, under Hooker, kept 
its place near Fredericksburg (§ 286) until May, 1863. 
Hooker then began a movement across the Kapidan 
towards Eichmond and was defeated in the battle of Chan- 



234 THE UNITED STATES. 

cellorsville (May 2-3) . The victorious army suffered the 
severest of losses in the death of Jackson, but this did 
not check Lee's preparations for a second in- 
vasion of the north, which began the next 
month. As his army moved northwards, very nearly on 
the route which it had followed the year before, the army 
of the Potomac held a parallel course through Mary- 
land and into Pennsylvania. The Confederate forces 
penetrated farther than in 1862 ; their advance came 
almost to Harrisburg, and threw the neighboring north- 
ern cities into great alarm ; but the pursuing army, 
now under Meade, met Lee at Gettysburg (July 1-3) 
and defeated him. The Confederate army, 

Gettysburg. , . . . . . 

assaulting its enemy m very strong positions, 
suffered losses which were almost irreparable, and it was 
never again quite the same army as before Gettysburg. 
Some northern cities were inclined to think that Lee's 
former successes had really been due to Jackson's genius, 
and that he had lost his power in losing Jackson. The 
campaign of 1864 was to prove the contrary. The cus- 
tomary retreat brought the two armies back to very 
nearly the same positions which they had occupied at 
the beginning of the war, the Eappahannock flowing 
between them. Here they remained until the following 
spring. 

292. The turning point of the war was evidently in the 
early days of July, 1863, when the victories of Vicks- 
The current of burg and Gettysburg came together. The 
success changes, national Govemmeut had at the beginning cut 
the Confederate States down to a much smaller area than 
might well have been expected ; its armies had pushed 
the besieging lines far into the hostile territory, and 
had held the ground which they had gained ; and the war 



THE CIVIL WAR. 235 



itself had developed a class of generals who cared less for 
the conquest of territory than for attacking and destroy- 
ing the opposing armies. The great drafts on the future 
which the credit of the Federal Government enabled the 
north to make gave it also a startling appearance of 
prosperity ; so far from feeling the war, it was driving 
production of every kind to a higher pitch than ever be- 
fore. The cities began to show greater evidences of 
wealth, and new rich men appeared, many of them being 
the " shoddy aristocracy," who had acquired wealth by 
mis-serving the Government, but more being able men 
who had grasped the sudden opportunities offered by the 
changes of affairs. 

293. The war had not merely developed improved 
weapons and munitions of war ; it had also spurred the 
people on to a more careful attention to the welfare of 
the soldiers, the fighting men drawn from their own 
number. The Sanitary Commission, the Christian Com- 
mission, and other voluntary associations for the physical 
and moral care of soldiers received and disbursed very 
large sums. The national Government was paying an 
average amount of $2,000,000 per day for the prosecu- 
tion of the war, and, in spite of the severest taxation, the 
debt grew to $500,000,000 in June, 1862, to twice that 
amount a year later, to $1,700,000,000 in June, 1864, and 
reached its maximum August 31, 1865, — $2,845,907,626. 
But this lavish expenditure was directed with energy and 
judgment. The blockading fleets were kept in perfect 
order and with every condition of success. The railroad 
and telegraph were brought into systematic use for the 
first time in modern warfare. Late in 1863 Stanton, the 
secretary of war, moved two corps of 23,000 men from 
Washington to Chattanooga, 1200 miles, in seven days. 



236 THE UNITED STATES. 

A year later he moved another corps, 15,000 strong, from 
Tennessee to Washington in eleven days, and within a 
month had collected vessels and transferred it to North 
Carolina. Towards the end of the war, when the capacity 
of the railroad for war purposes had been fully learned, 
these sudden transfers of troops by the Federal Govern- 
ment almost neutralized the Confederate advantage of 
interior lines. 

294. On the other hand, the Federal armies now held 
almost all the great southern through lines of railroad, 
except the Georgia lines and those which supplied Lee 
from the south (§ 296). The want of the southern peo- 
ple was merely growing in degree, not in kind. The 

conscription, sweeping from the first, had be- 
come omnivorous ; towards the end of the war 
every man between seventeen and fifty-five was legally 
liable to service, and in practice the only limit was 
physical incapacity. In 1863 the Federal Government 
also was driven to conscription. The first attempts to 
carry it out resulted in forcible resistance in several 
places, the worst being the " draft riots '' in New York 
(July), when the .city was in the hands of the mob for 
several days. All the resistance was put down ; but ex- 
emptions and substitute purchases were so freely per- 
mitted that the draft in the north had little effect except 
as a stimulus to the States in filling their quotas of vol- 
unteers by voting bounties. 

295. Early in 1864 Grant (§ 290) was made lieutenant- 
general, with the command of all the armies. He went 
Grant and sher- to Washington to mcct Lee, leaving Sherman 

'^*"- to face Johnston at Dalton. Events had thus 
brought the two ablest of the Confederate generals oppo- 
site the two men who were the best product of the war on 



THE CIVIL WAR. 237 



the northern side. It remained to be seen whether Lee, 
with his army of northern Virginia, could resist the 
methods by which Grant and Sherman had won almost 
all the great table-land which occupies the heart of the 
country east of the Mississippi. And it remained to be 
seen, also, whether the reputation which Grant had won 
at a distance from the political atmosphere of Washing- 
ton would not wither in his new position. It was neces- 
sary for him to take the overland route to Kichmond, or 
meet McClellan's fate. He did not hesitate. Early in 
May, 1864, with about twice as many men (125,000) as 
Lee, he entered the " Wilderness " on the other side of 
the Rapidan. At the same time he sent 30,000 men, un- 
der Butler, up the James river; but this part of his 
plan proved of comparatively little service. 

296. Two weeks' hard fighting in the Wilderness and 
at Spotsylvania Court House (May 5-18), and four days 
more at North Anna (May 23-27), with flank "v^\\dQrne%%" 
movements as a means of forcing Lee out of campaign. 
positions too strong to be taken from the front, brought 
the army of the Potomac to Cold Harbor, in the imme- 
diate defences of Richmond. One assault, bloodily re- 
pulsed, showed that there was no thoroughfare in this 
direction. Lee had so diligently prepared that his posi- 
tion became stronger as he was driven into greater con- 
centration ; and Grant began to move along the eastern 
face of the line of Confederate fortifications, striking at 
them as he passed them, but finding no weak spot. As 
he crossed the James river and reached Petersburg, he 
came at last into dangerous proximity to the 
railroads which brought Lee's supplies from 
the south — the Weldon Railroad, running directly 
south, the Danville Railroad, running south-west, and 



238 THE UNITED STATES. 

the Southside Eailroad, running west. At this end of his 
line, therefore, Lee kept the best part of his troops, and 
resisted with increasing stubbornness Grant's efforts to 
carry his lines farther to the south-west or to reach the 
railroads. Eesorting to the plan which had been so 
effective with McClellan, he sent Early on a raid up the 
Shenandoah valley to threaten Washington (July). But 
Early was not Jackson, and he returned with no more 
success than the frightening of the authorities at Wash- 
ington. Grant put Sheridan in command in the valley, 
and he beat Early at Cedar Creek (October), scattering 
his army for the remainder of the war. In August 
Grant succeeded in seizing a few miles of the Weldon 
Railroad ; but Lee brought his supplies in wagons round 
that portion held by Grant. Late in the year this was 
stopped by the destruction of some twenty miles of the 
road. Here Grant was himself stopped for the time. 
Lee had so taken advantage of every defensive position 
that Grant could not reach the nearer of the other two 
railroads without an advance of fifteen miles, or the 
further one without a circuit of about forty miles. The 
two armies remained locked until the following spring. 
Grant, however, was operating still more successfully else- 
where through Sherman. 

297. Sherman (§ 295) had moved on the same day as 
Grant (May 5). Johnston's retreat was skilfully con- 
johnston's re- ductcd ) cvcry positlou was held to the last 
treat. momeut ; and it was not until the middle of 
July that Sherman had forced him back to his strongest 
lines of defence — those around Atlanta. The Confed- 
erate forces could not retreat much beyond Atlanta, for 
the great central table-land here begins to fall into 
the plains which stretch to the Atlantic. Sherman had 



THE CIVIL WAR. 239 



now been brought so far from his base that the two 
armies were much more nearly on an equality than in 
May ; and Johnston was preparing for the decisive battle 
when Davis made Sherman's way clear. A feature in 
Davis's conduct of the war had been his extraordinary 
tendency to favoritism. He had been forced to take 
Johnston as commander in Georgia; and the wide- 
spread alarm caused by Johnston's inexplicable per- 
sistence in retreating gave him the excuse he desired. 
He removed Johnston (July 17), naming Hood, a 
"fighting general," as his successor. Before the end 
of the month Hood had made three furious attacks on 
Sherman and been beaten in all of them. Moving 
around Atlanta, as Grant was doing around 
Petersburg, Sherman cut the supplying rail- 
roads, and at last was able to telegraph to Washington 
(September 2), "Atlanta is ours, and fairly won." 

2^. Hood, by the direct command of Davis, then 
adopted a course which led to the downfall of the Con- 
federacy in the following spring. Moving 
from between Sherman and the open coun- 
try, he set out for Tennessee, expecting to draw Sher- 
man after him. Sherman sent Thomas to ISTashville, 
called out the resources of the north-west to su]Dport 
him, and left Hood to his march and his fate. Hood 
reached Nashville ; but in the middle of December 
Thomas burst out upon him, routed his army, and pur- 
sued it so vigorously that it never again reunited. One 
of the two great armies of the Confederacy had dis- 
appeared ; and Sherman, with one of the finest armies of 
the war, an army of 60,000 picked veteran troops, stood 
on the edge of the Georgia mountains, without an organ- 
ized force between him and the back of Lee's army in 
Virginia. 



240 THE UNITED STATES. 

299. In the meantime the presidential election of 
1864 had taken place, resulting in the re-election of Lin- 
coln, with Andrew Johnson as Vice-President. 

Election of 1864. ™, ' • .-.•,-, 

The Democratic convention had declared that, 
after four years of failure to restore the Union by war, 
during which the Constitution had been violated in all 
its parts under the plea of military necessity, a cessa- 
tion of hostilities ought to be obtained, and had nomi- 
nated McClellan and Pendleton, Farragut's victory in 
Mobile Bay (August 5), by which he sealed up the last 
port, except Wilmington, of the blockade-runners, and 
the evidently staggering condition of the Confederate 
resistance in the east and the west, were the sharpest 
commentaries on the Democratic platform ; and its can- 
Admission of didates carried only three of the twenty- 
Nevada. £yg States which took part in the election. 
The thirty-sixth State — Nevada — had been admitted in 
1864. 

300. Sherman began (November 16, 1864) the exe- 
cution of his own plan, — to ''send back his wounded, 
Sherman's march ^^'^^^^ ^ wreck of tlic railroad, and, with his 
through Georgia effcctivc amiv, movc through Geora^ia, smash- 

andtheCarolinas. . *^ / m tt \ J i. j 

mg things to the sea." He had been drawing 
supplies from a point 500 miles distant, over a single rail- 
road. He now destroyed the railroad and the telegraph, 
cut off his communication with the north, and moved 
towards the Atlantic coast. The sea was reached on 
December 12, and Savannah was taken on the twentieth. 
He had threatened so many points, and kept the enemy 
in so much doubt as to his objects, thtrt there had hardly 
been men enough in his front at any one time to m?vke a 
skirmish line. On January 15, 1865, the army moved 
north from Savannah, through Columbia, to Fayetteville, 



THE CIVIL WAR. 241 



N.C. The march had forced the evacuation of Charleston 
a.nd the other coast cities, and their garrisons had been put 
by Davis under command of Johnston as a last hope. 
Wilmington, which had been captured by a land and sea 
force on the day when Sherman left Savannah, was an 
opening for communication with Washington; and it 
would have been possible for Sherman, with Wilmington 
as a base, to crush Johnston at once. All that he cared 
to do was to hold Johnston where he was while Grant 
should begin his final attack on Lee. 

301. During the opening days of March, 1865, Sheridan, 
with a body of cavalry, moved from the Shenandoah 
valley along the James river to a junction with Grant 
(§ 296) . On the way he had ruined the canal and railroad 
communication directly west from E-ichmond, and had 
reduced Lee to dependence on the two railroads running 
south-west. Grant resumed his attempts to work his 
lines further round to the south of Petersburg ; and, with 
each successful advance, Lee was compelled to lengthen 
his thin line of men. Sheridan was put in command on 
the extreme left ; he pushed forward to Five 
Forks, destroyed the Southside Eailroad 
(April 1), and held his ground. Giving Lee time to 
lengthen his line to meet this new danger. Grant gave 
the signal for a general advance the next day. It was 
successful everywhere ; Petersburg was taken, and Eich- 
mond the next day ; Davis and the other political leaders 
fled to North Carolina ; and Lee retreated westward, hop- 
ing to join Johnston. The pursuit was too 
hot, and he surrendered (April 9). All the ''''^" ^^° 
terms of surrender named by Grant were generous : no 
private property was to be surrendered ; the men were 
even to retain their horses, "because they would need 



242 THE UNITED STATES. 

them for the spring ploughing and farm-work " ; and both 
officers and men were to be dismissed on parole, not to be 
disturbed by the United States Government so long as 
they preserved their parole and did not violate the laws. 
It should be stated, also, to Grant's honor that, when the 
politicians afterwards undertook to repudiate some of 
the terms of surrender, he personally intervened and 
used the power of his own name to force an exact fulfil- 
Surrenderof nicnt. Johustou Surrendered on much the 
Johnston, same terms (April 2Q), after an unsuccessful 
effort at a broader settlement. All organized resistance 
had now ceased ; Union cavalry were ranging the south, 
picking up Government property or arresting leaders ; but 
it was not until May that the last detached parties of 
Confederates, particularly beyond the Mississippi, gave 
up the contest. 

302. Just after Lee's surrender President Lincoln 
died by assassination (April 15), the theatrical crime of 

a half-crazed enthusiast. Even this event 

Death of Lincoln. ^.^ ,. t,i » • -, , 

did not impel the American people to any 
vindictive use of their success for the punishment of 
individuals. In the heat of the war, in 1862, Congress 
had so changed the criminal law that the punishment of 
treason and rebellion should no longer be death alone, 
but death or fine and imprisonment. Even this modified 
punishment was not inflicted. There was no hanging 
for treason ; some of the leaders were imprisoned for a 
time, but were never brought to trial. The leader and 
President of the Confederate States is living (1889) 
quietly at his home in Mississippi; and the Vice-Presi- 
dent, before his death, had returned to the Congress of 
the United States as an efficient and respected member. 

303. The armies of the Confederacy are supposed to 



THE CIVIL WAR. 243 



have been at their strongest (700,000) at the beginning 
of 1863 ; and it is doubtful whether they con- jhe opposing 
tained 200,000 men in March, 1865. The dis- ^^^i^^- 
satisfaction of the southern people at the manner in 
which Davis had managed the war seems to have been 
profound ; and it was only converted into hero-worship 
by the ill-advised action of the Federal Government in 
arresting and imprisoning him. Desertion had become 
so common in 1864, and the attempts of the Confederate 
Government to force the people into the ranks had be- 
come so arbitrary, that the bottom of the Confederacy, 
the democratic elements which had given it all the suc- 
cess it had ever obtained, had dropped out of it before 
Sherman moved northward from Savannah; in some 
parts the people had really taken up arms against the 
conscripting officers. On the contrary, the numbers of 
the Federal armies increased steadily until March, 1865, 
when there were a few hundreds over a million. As 
soon as organized resistance ceased, the disbanding of 
the men began; they were sent home at the rate of 
about 300,000 a month, about 50,000 being retained in 
service as a standing army. The debt reached 



its maximum August 31, 1865, amounting to 
^2,845,907,626.56. Some $800,000,000 of revenue had 
also been spent mainly on the war ; States, cities, coun- 
ties, and towns had spent their own taxation and accu- 
mulated their own debts for war purposes ; the payments 
for pensions Avill probably amount to $1,500,000,000 in 
the end ; the expenses of the Confederacy can never be 
known ; the property destroyed by the Federal armies 
and by Confederate armies can hardly be estimated; 
and the money value ($2,000,000,000) of the slaves 
in the south was wiped out by the war. Altogether 



244 THE UNITED STATES. 

while the cost of the war cannot be exactly calculated, 
^8,000,000,000 is a moderate estimate. 

304. In return for such an expenditure, and the death 
of probably 300,000 men on each side, the abiding gain 
Results of the was iucalculablc. The rich section, which 
^^^' had been kept back in the general develop- 
ment by a single institution, and had been a clog on the 
advance of the whole country, had been dragged up to a 
level with the rest of the country. Free labor was soon 
to show itself far superior to slave labor in the south ; 
and the south was to reap the largest material gain from 
the destruction of the Civil War (§ 314). The per- 
sistent policy of paying the debt immediately resulted 
in the higher taxation falling on the richer north and 
west; and the new wealth of the south will forever 
escape the severe taxation which the other sections have 
been compelled to feel. As a result of the struggle the 
moral stigma of slavery was removed. The power of 
the nation, never before asserted openly, had made a 
place for itself; and yet the continuing power of the 
States saved the national power from a development into 
centralized tyranny. And the new power of the nation, 
guaranteeing the restriction of government to a single 
nation in central North America, gave security against 
any introduction of international relations, international 
armament, international wars, and continual war tax- 
ation into the territory occupied by the United States. 
An approach for four years to the international policy 
of Europe had given security against its future necessity. 
Finally, democracy in America had certainly shown its 
ability to maintain the unity of its empire. 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 245 



XI. 

THE EECONSTEUCTED NATIOK 

1865-87. 

305. The Federal Government had begun the war with 
an honest expression of its determination not to interfere 
with slavery ; the progress of the war had jhe i3th 
forced it into passing the 13th amendment amendment. 
in 1865, abolishing slavery in the United States for- 
ever. In much the same way circumstances were driv- 
ing it into interference with what had always been re- 
garded as the rights of the States. In the latter case 
the process was certain to find an obstacle in Lincoln's 
successor, Johnson. He had been elected, like „ 

-' ' Pres. Johnson 

Tyler, to the comparatively unimportant office and the Repub- 
of Vice-President in order to gain the votes "^^" '^^^^' 
of War Democrats ; and now the dominant party found 
itself with a President opposed to its fundamental views 
of the powers of the Federal Government. The case was 
worse for Johnson, since the war had built up a new 
party. Until 1861 the Eepublican party had been a mix- 
ture of a strong Whig element and a weak Democratic 
element ; now it was a real party, and demanded com- 
plete loyalty from its leaders, not skilful compromises 
between its two elements. Just as in the cases of Sew- 
ard, Sumner, Trumbull, and very many of its original 
leaders, the party was now ready to repudiate its leaders 
if they did not come up to its ideas. 



246 THE UNITED STATES. 

306. The universal idea in 1861 had been that the 
States were to be forced to return with all their rights un- 

Presidentiai re- impaired. Tliis original notion was seriously 
construction, limited bj the Emancipation Proclamation 
of 1862-63 ; as soon as the President opened a door, by 
demanding a recognition of the abolition of slavery as 
a condition precedent to the return of a State, the way 
was just as open for the imposition of whatever con- 
ditions Congress as well should think essential to an 
abiding peace. But Congress was not called to face the 
difficulty for some time. President Lincoln went on to 
reorganize civil government in Virginia, Tennessee, Ar- 
kansas, and Louisiana, by giving amnesty to such voters 
as would swear to support the Government of the United 
States and the abolition of slavery, and recognizing the 
State officers elected by such voters. When Johnson 
succeeded to the presidency in April, 1865, he had a clear 
field before him, for Congress was not to meet until De- 
cember. Before that time he had reorganized the gov- 
ernments of the seceding States ; they had passed the 
13th amendment (§ 125) ; and they were ready to apply 
for readmission to Congress. Tennessee was readmitted 
in 1866 by Congress ; but the other seceding States were 
refused recognition for a time. 

307. It was not possible that slave-owners should pass 
at one step from the position of absolute masters to that 
of political equality with their late slaves. Their State 
legislation assumed at once a very paternal character. 
Every means was taken, in the passage of contract and 
vagrant laws, and enactments of that nature, to force the 
freedmen to work ; and the legislation seemed to the 
northern people a re-establishment of slavery under a 
new name. Johnson had a very unhappy disposition for 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 247 

such a state of affairs ; he had strong convictions, great 
stubbornness, and a hasty, abnost reckless, ^^^^^| ^^^^^^^ 
habit of speech. As soon as it became clear Congress and the 
that Congress did not intend to readmit the 
Southern States at once he began (February, 1866) to 
denounce Congress in public speeches as "no Congress" 
so long as it consisted of representatives from but part 
of the States. The quarrel grew rapidly more bitter; 
the Congressional elections of 1866 made it certain that 
the Kepublicans would have a two-thirds majority in 
both houses through the rest of Johnson's term of office ; 
and the majority passed over the veto (§ 113) every bill 
which Johnson vetoed. Thus were passed the Freedmen's 
Bureau Bill (1866) for the protection of the Admission of 
emancipated negroes, the Act for the admis- Nebraska. 
sion of Nebraska, with equal suffrage for blacks and 
whites (1867), the Tenure of Office Bill making the 
assent of the senate necessary to removals, which had 
always been regarded as within the absolute power of 
the President (1867), and the Eeconstruction Acts (1867). 
The increasing bitterness of the quarrel be- impeachment of 
tween the President and the majority in Con- ^*^^ President, 
gress led to the impeachment of the President in 1868 
for removing Stanton, the secretary of war, without the 
assent of the senate ; but on trial by the senate a two- 
thirds majority for conviction could not be obtained, and 
Johnson served out his term. 

308. The Eeconstruction Acts divided the seceding 
States into military districts, each under command of a 
general officer, who was to leave to the State Govern- 
ments then in existence such powers as he should not 
consider to be used to deprive the negroes of their rights. 
The State Governments of the seceding States were to 



248 THE UNITED STATES. 

be considered provisional only, until conventions, elected 
without the exclusion of the negroes, but with the exclu- 
sion of the leading Confederates, should form new or 
" reconstructed " State Governments, on a basis of man- 
hood suffrage, and their legislatures should ratify the 
TheKth 14-th amendment to the Constitution (§ 125). 

amendment. "Yhi^ amendment, passed by Congress in 1866, 
was in five sections, but had three main divisions. 
(1) All persons born or naturalized in the United States 
were declared citizens of the United States and of their 
States, and the States were forbidden to abridge the 
" privileges or immunities " of such citizens. This was 
to override the Dred Scott decision (§ 249). (2) The 
representation of the States in Congress was to be re- 
duced in proportion to the number of persons whom they 
should exclude from the elective franchise. This was to 
induce the States to adopt negro suffrage. On the other 
hand, specified classes of Confederate office-holders were 
excluded from office until Congress should remove their 
disabilities. (3) The war debts of the Confederacy and 
the seceding States were declared void forever, and the 
war debt of the United States was guaranteed. Con- 
gress was given power to enforce all these provisions by 
" appropriate legislation." 

309. The presidential election of 1868 sealed the pro- 
cess of reconstruction. The Democrats opposed it, and 
nominated Seymour and Blair ; the Eepubli- 
■ cans endorsed it, and nominated Grant and 
Colfax. Virginia, Mississi^^pi, and Texas were the only 
States of the late Confederacy which were excluded from 
this election ; all the rest had been reconstructed, and re- 
admitted by Congress in June, 1868 ; and the Eepublican 
candidates carried twenty-six of the thirty-four voting 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 249 

States, and were elected. The legislatures of tlie recon- 
structed States, representing mainly the negroes freed by 
the war, were devoted supporters of the new order of 
things ; and their ratifications secured the necessary three- 
fourths of the States to make the 14th amendment a part 
of the Constitution (1868). Congress went on to propose a 
15th amendment, forbidding the United States, jhe isth 
or any State, to limit or take away the right an^endment. 
of suffrage by reason of race, color, or previous condition 
of servitude. This was ratified by the necessary number 
of States and became a part of the Constitution (1870). 
Ratification of it was imposed as an additional condition 
on Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas, which had rejected the 
original terms of readmission. They accepted it, and were 
readmitted (1870) . It was not until January 30, 1871, that 
all the States were once more represented in Congress. 

310, The foreign affairs of the United States during 
this period took on a new appearance. The country's 
promptness in disarming at the end of the war put it 
under no disadvantage in dealing with other nations ; 
power and pacific intentions were united in the act. The 
successful completion of the Atlantic cable (1866) gave 
a celerity and directness to diplomacy which was well 
suited to American methods. The tone of American 
complaint at the continued presence of French soldiers in 
Mexico grew more emphatic as the success of 
the war became assured ; and, at the end of 
the war, significant movements of troops to the Mexican 
frontier led the French emperor to withdraw his supj)ort 
of Maximilian. Alaska was purchased from Alaska. Treaty 
Russia in 1867. The treaty of Washington of Washington. 
(1871) provided for the settlement by arbitration of the 
"Alabama" disputes, of the north-western boundary, 



250 THE UNITED STATES. 

and of tlie claims of Canada for damages for use of 
the shore by American fishermen. The capture by 

a Spanish man-of-war of the "Virginius," 

'^^^ " Jase'"'"^ ^ vessel claiming American nationality, and 

The Chinese ^^^ exccutiou of a part of her crew (1873), 

threatened to interrupt friendly relations with 
Spain; but the rupture was averted by proof that the 
vessel's papers were false. Chinese immigration had 
grown largely on the Pacific coast. There were riotous 
attacks on the Chinese by worthless white men; and 
many others did not feel that they were a desirable 
political addition to the population of the United States. 
A treaty with China was obtained (1880), by which the 
limitation of Chinese immigration was allowed.^ So, also, 

the raising of money in the United States to 
ynamiters. ^^g^g^ ^-j^^ dcstructiou of privatc aud public 
buildings in England by some of the more desperate of 
the Irish people (1885) gave England reason for discon- 
tent. But the American Government had no power in 
the premises. The matter was under the exclusive juris- 
diction of the State Governments ; and, as soon as these 
began to apply the common law to the case, the " dyna- 
mite subscriptions" disappeared. Further difficulties 
made their appearance as to the Canadian fisheries (1886- 
The Canadian 87). Whcu Amcricau fishing-vcssels bought 
fisheries, j^jg qj. j^r^^^ {-^ Canadian ports, the Canadian 
Government seized and condemned them, on the ground 
that such purchases were acts "preparatory to fishing 
in Canadian waters." Retaliatory measures were sug- 

1 After rigorous legislation in 1882 and 1S84 by Congress under the 
provisions of this treaty, the expected ratification by China of a new 
treaty that had been long negotiating fell through in 1888, and Congress 
passed a law absolutely prohibiting the immigration of Chinese laborers. 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 251 

gested, but no full retaliatory system has been adopted, 
nor has the dispute yet been settled. 

311. The prosperity of the United States knew no 
cessation. It had been found that gold was not confined 
to California. In 1858 it had been discovered 
in Colorado, at Pike's Peak. It has since been 
found in most of the Pacific States and Terri- 
tories. Silver, a metal hardly known hitherto in the 
United States, was discovered in Nevada (1858) ; and 
this metal also has been found to be widely 
scattered over the Pacific coast. Petroleum 
was found in north-western Pennsylvania (1859), and 
the enormous drain of this oil from the earth still con- 
tinues without apparently affecting the reser- 
voir. The coal-fields of the country began to 
be understood clearly. Taylor, in 1848, thought that the 
coal-area of the United States amounted to 133,000 square 
miles ; it was estimated in 1883 at over 200,000 
square miles. Natural gas has since come 
into use, and has made production of many 
kinds cleaner, more effective, and cheaper. Manufactures 
and every variety of production have increased with 
cumulative rapidity. In 1860 the largest flouring-mill 
in the United States was in Oswego, N. Y., the next two 
in Richmond, Va., and the fourth in New York city; 
and the capacity of the largest was only 300,000 barrels 
a year. In 1887 the flour production of Minneapolis, 
almost unknown in 1860, is 100,000 barrels a week or 
5,000,000 barrels a year. The absolute free trade which 
prevails between the States has resulted in a constant 
shifting of centres of production, a natural arrival at the 
best conditions of production, and an increasing develop- 
ment. Mulhall, perhaps safer as a foreign authority, 



252 THE UNITED STATES. 

gives the total manufactures of the United States as 
£682,000,000 in 1870 and £888,000,000 in 1880, Great 
Britain coming next with £642,000,000 in 1870 and 
£758,000,000 in 1880. He estimates the accumulated 
wealth of Great Britain at £8,310,000,000 in 

Wpalth 

■ 1870 and £8,960,000,000 in 1880, an increase 
of £650,000,000; and that of the United States at £6,320,- 
000,000 in 1870 and £7,880,000,000 in 1880, an increase 
of £1,560,000,000. If he had followed the American 
census returns his value for 1880 would have been twenty- 
five per cent, larger. In 1870 the United States stood 
third in wealth ; in 1880 they had passed France in the 
race, and stood at least second. The country whose pop- 
ulation has been developed within 280 years does already 
one-third of the world's mining, one-fourth of its manu- 
facturing, and one-fifth of its agriculture ; and at least one- 
sixth of the world's wealth is already concentrated in the 
strip of territory in central North America which is the 
home of the United States. 

312. Of the 290,000 miles of railroad in the world, 

probably 135,000 are in the United States. Of the 

600,000 miles of telegraph lines, more than a 

ai ways. £q^j.^]^ ^^q ^^ ^j^g United States ; and the 

American telephone lines are probably still longer in the 
aggregate. The new development of the American rail- 
ways began in 1869, when Vanderbilt consolidated the 
Hudson Eiver and New York Central Kailroads and 
formed a trunk line to the west. It was undoubtedly 
hastened by the completion of the Central Pacific line in 
that year, and it has resulted in a universal tendency to 
consolidation of railways and the evolution of " systems," 
under combined managements (§ 273). The coincident 
introduction of Bessemer steel rails, the steady increase 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 253 

of weight carried by trains, and concentrated competition 
have reduced railway freight rates through the whole 
of this period. The average rates per ton per mile were 
1.7 cents in New York in 1870, and 0.8 in 1880; 2.4 cents 
in Ohio in 1870, and 0.9 in 1880. The persistent effects 
of such a process on the industries of so large a country 
can hardly be described. 

313. The extraordinary stimulus given to a new terri- 
tory, if it has any basis for production, by the introduc- 
tion of a new railway, is also quite beyond Railways in the 
description. Most of the western railways ^®^*- 
have had to build up their own traffic ; the railway has 
been built, and the sales of lands have afterward brought 
into existence the towns and even States which are to 
support it. Nebraska was described in the Government 
reports of 1854 as a desert country, hopelessly unfitted 
for agriculture, and the maps of the time put it down as 
a part of the " Great American Desert." It is now one 
of the leading agricultural States of the Union, with a 
population of a million ; and Dakota is waiting only for 
the legal form of admission^ to become a State. The 
profits of railway construction, the opportunities for 
skilful management in the development of territory, and 
the spice of gambling which permeated the whole were 
great temptations to Americans to embark in the busi- 
ness. The miles of railway constructed per annum, 
which had been from 1000 to 3000 (averaging about 
1500 miles) for the period 1859-68, rose to 4615 miles 
in 1869, to 6070 miles in 1870, and to 7379 miles in 1871. 
Masses of laborers were brought into situations from 
which they could not easily escape ; and masses of capi- 

1 See notes, pp. 58 and 96. 



254 THE UNITED STATES. 

tal were locked up in railways which were finally unpro- 
ductive, and resulted only in total loss. The result was 
Financial the financial crisis of 1873, from which the 

crisis of 1873. couutry has hardly yet fully recovered. 
314. For the first time in the history of the United 
States, the south has taken a normal part in all this 

Progress of the development (§ 304), though it was not until 
south. about 1885 that southern progress was fully 
understood by the rest of the country. Staggering under 
a load of poverty and discouragement which might have 
appalled any people, with the addition of social problems 
which no other country has solved with any great satis- 
faction, the southern people began to feel for the first 
time the healthy atmosphere of free labor. The former 
slave is a free laborer, and the white man has gone to 
work ; white labor produced ten per cent, of the cotton 
crop of 1860 and fifty-five per cent, of that of 1886. 
The last eighteen slave-labor crops of cotton amounted 
to 51,000,000 bales; the first eighteen free-labor crops 
amounted to 75,000,000 bales. And the latter figures 
are deceptive from the fact that, in their period, the 
south had turned a large percentage of its labor and 
capital into industries which had not been possible, only 
longed for, under the slave system. Cotton-seeds were 
waste under slavery : 600,000 tons of them were crushed 
in 1886, giving an entirely new production of $12,000,000 
per annum of cotton-seed oil. Southern railways, which 
had made but a meagre comparison with those of the 
north and west in 1860, began to assume something of 
the network appearance of the latter ; they too began to 
concentrate into " systems," to reduce rates and improve 
service, and to develop new territory. Southern manu- 
factures began to affect northern markets; cotton-mills 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 255 

in the south began to reap the advantages of their 
immediate contiguity to their raw material. Pennsyl- 
vania iron-masters were startled as their product was 
undersold in the Philadelphia markets by southern iron ; 
and the great mineral fields of Tennessee and northern 
Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, over which Sherman's 
and Hood's men had so lately been tramping and fighting, 
were brought into notice and development. Wonderful 
as the general progress of the United States has been 
during this period, the share of the new south under free 
labor has been one of the most remarkable phases in it. 

315. The population rose from 31,443,321 in 1860 to 
38,558,371 in 1870, and 50,155,783 in 1880. At the 
normal rate of increase up to 1860 — one- increase of pop- 
third for each ten years — the increase from elation. 
1860 to 1870 should have been about ten and a half 
millions, instead of seven millions. The difference repre- 
sents the physical influences of the civil war. This 
influence was shown most plainly in the Southern States, 
notably in South Carolina and Alabama, which had 
hardly any increase, and a real decrease in adult males. 
It should also be noticed that natural checks on the 
increase of population are plainly perceptible in the 
Atlantic States in 1880, and were probably in operation, 
to a less extent, in 1860-70, though they were made in- 
distinguishable by the war. The increase in 1870-80 at 
the former normal rate should have been a little over a 
million more than it was. The tendency will be more evi- 
dent in future, but it ought to be allowed for in 1860-70. 

316. The material prosperity of the country brought 
its own disadvantages. The sudden development of 
wealth gave the country for the first time a distinct 
wealthy class, not engaged in production of any kind, 



256 THE UNITED STATES. 

and very often having none of tlie characteristics of the 

people who are the real strength of the country. The 

, inevitable extravagance of Government man- 

The era of " 

speculation and agemcnt, aggravated by a period of civil war, 
corruption. ^]^q^ ^^le pcoplc werc disposed to excuse 
almost any error of detail for which good motives could 
be shown, had its reflex influence on the people, as well 
as on the Governments of the nation, the States, and 
the cities. An era of legal tender paper currency (§ 272), 
legally unvarying in value, but showing its effects in the 
constant shiftings of price in every other thing, brought 
uncertainty as to every article, price, and transaction. 
The people had learned that ''unhappy lesson — that 
there is an easier way to make a dollar than by working 
for it"; and it was not long before speculation among 
the people called out its correlative of dishonesty among 
Government officials. Money was lavished on the navy ; 
in expenditures on that branch of the service the United 
States stood third or fourth among the nations, while the 
effective results were discouraging. " Eings " 
of politicians obtained control of the larger 
cities. The " Tweed ring " in New York city was over- 
thrown in 1872 ; but New York was not the only city of 
corruption : Philadelphia, Chicago, and almost every city 
large enough to have fat opportunities for fraud and to 
deprive universal suffrage of the general acquaintance 
of neighbors, each fell under control of its " ring," and 
was plundered without mercy. Corruption even attacked 
the judiciary ; for the first time American judges were 
found who were willing to prostitute their positions, and 
the members of the " Erie ring " were able to hold their 
ill-gotten railroads because they owned the necessary 
judges. A "whiskey ring" of distillers and Govern- 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 257 

ment employees (1874) assumed national proportions, 
and robbed the Government of a large percentage of 
its internal taxation on spirits. The "star 
routes," in which the contracts for mail trans- 
portation were altered at the discretion of the contractor 
and the Government after the competition for the con- 
tracts had been decided, gave rise to as great scandals 
through the connivance of Government agents with dis- 
honest contractors. No one wno lived in this period 
will wonder at the pessimistic tone of the public speeches 
which marked the hundredth year of the republic (1876). 
317. The republic had life and vigor in it, and its 
people showed no disposition to despair before the mass 
of corruption which confronted them. The newspapers 
attacked the star- route contractors, and drove the Govern- 
ment into an attack upon the ring, which broke it up. 
The efforts of private individuals, backed by newspapers, 
broke up the Tweed ring, banished or imprisoned its 
members, expelled the corrupt judges from the bench, 
and carried destruction into the widespread whiskey ring. 
Local rings were attacked in city after city, were broken 
up and revived again, but always found the struggle for 
existence more and more desperate. The people have 
shown themselves almost vindictive in driving out of 
public life any who have been proved dishonest : when 
the "Credit Mobilier," the construction com- --credit 
pany of the Central Pacific Railroad, was Mobiiier." 
shown to have bribed or influenced members of Congress 
to vote for it, there is ground for believing that the pun- 
ishment was distributed more widely than justice de- 
manded ; and it has come to be recognized as a decided 
disadvantage for a public man to be known as shrewd 
rather than honest. 



258 THE UNITED STATES. 

318. The completion of reconstruction in 1870, and the 
adoption of the 15th amendment (§ 125), made negro 
The reconstruct- Suffrage the law of the land, even in the South- 
ed Government, gpj^ States. The southcm whites were the 
tax-payers ; the negroes were the majority ; and the 
negro legislatures proved hopelessly corrupt. In one or 
two States the whites recovered control of their States by 
hiring their negroes to remain at home on election day, 
or by threatening them with discharge for voting. Fail- 
ing in this line of action in other States, the whites fell 
into a steady tendency towards violence. A widespread 

" Ku-Kiux- secret society, the " Ku-Klux-Klan," beginning 
Kian." with the effort to overawe the negro popula- 
tion by whipping and arson, was rapidly driven into 
political murders. The reconstructed Governments re- 
sisted as best they could. They tried to use the force of 
the State against the offenders ; but the best part of the 
force of the State was the white element, which was most 
deeply involved in the resistance to the legal Government. 
On the application of the legislature of a State, or of the 
governor if the legislature cannot be summoned, the 
President may send Federal troops to suppress rebellion 
(§ 125). The reconstructed Governments called on Pres- 
ident Grant for such aid, and received it. But the whites 
were the stronger race, struggling for property, and know- 
ing well the letter of the law. They refused to resist the 
smallest atom of Federal authority : a large force of them, 
mainly old Confederates and excellent fighting men, who 
had seized the city of New Orleans and overturned the 
reconstructed Government (1874), retired quietly before a 
detachment of United States troops, and allowed the State 
Government to be restored. The little United States army 
in the south was kept busy. Wherever it appeared, resist- 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION, 259 

ance ceased at once, breaking out at the same time else- 
where. The whites had to gain but a single victory; as 
soon as they secured a majority in a State legislature they 
so arranged the election laws and machinery that a negro 
majority was thenceforth impossible. The legislatures 
and governors, with nearly all the local officers, were then 
Democrats : calls for Federal troops ceased at once ; and 
the Eepublicans of the north, the dominant party of the 
nation, were reduced to the necessity of seeing their 
southern vote disappear, without the ability to do any- 
thing to check the process. As the election of 1876 drew 
near, the reconstructed Governments of all the seceding 
States, except Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, had 
become Democratic. 

319. Congress, which was controlled by the Eepubli- 
cans, had not been idle. The Civil Eights Act (1870) 
provided that fines and damages should be 
imposed for any attempt to violate or evade "'' '^ ® " • 
the 15th amendment or for conspiracy to deprive the 
negroes of the right of suffrage. The Election Act 
(1870) exercised for the first time the right 
to alter or amend State laws as to Federal 
elections which the Constitution had given to Congress. 
This was strengthened by another Act in the following year. 
The Force Act (1871) went farther than the 
instincts of the American people could follow 
Congress. It provided that any conspiracy or combina- 
tion strong enough to deprive the negroes of the bene- 
fits of the 14th amendment should be evidence of a '^ de- 
nial by the State of the equal protection of the laws " to 
all its citizens ; that the President should be empowered 
to use the army, navy, and militia to suppress such com- 
binations ; that, when any combination should appear, in 



260 THE UNITED STATES. 

arms, the act should be a rebellion against the United 
States ; and that, in such case, the President should have 
power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in the rebel- 
lious Territory (§ 305). 

320. It was plain that the southern whites meant to 
govern their States with little present regard to the last 
two amendments, and that it was impossible to defeat 
their purpose without cutting up the State system in the 
south by the roots. Even in 1872 a strong element of 
the Kepublican party thought that the party policy had 
gone too near the latter course. It held a convention of 

Liberal Repub- its owu, uudcr the uamc of the Liberal Eepub- 
lican party, licau party, and nominated Greeley and Brown. 
The Democratic party, anxious to save local government 
and State rights in the south, but completely discredited 
by its opposition to the war, accepted the Liberal Repub- 
lican platform and nominations. Its action was in one 
sense a failure ; Greeley had been one of the bitterest and 
angriest critics of the Democratic party, and so many of 
the Democrats refused to vote for him that his defeat 
was hardly ever doubtful. The Republicans 
' renominated Grant, with Henry Wilson for 
Vice-President ) and they received the votes of 286 of the 
349 electors, and were elected. The action of the Demo- 
cratic party in adopting the Liberal Republican platform, 
and thus tacitly abandoning its opposition to reconstruc- 
tion, brought it back into the lines of political conflict 
and made it a viable party. 

321. The election of 1876 was the first really con- 
tested election since 1860. The Democrats nominated 

Tilden and Hendricks, and the Republicans 

Hayes and Wheeler. The platforms showed 

no distinct grounds of party struggle, except that of 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 261 

the ins and the outs. The election turned on the votes 
of the Southern States in which the reconstructed Gov- 
ernments still held their own or claimed to do so ; 
and the extrarconstitutional device of an electoral com- 
mission resulted in a decision in favor of Hayes and 
Wheeler. As a part of the result, some arrangement had 
been made for the settlement of the southern difficulties, 
for Grant immediately withdrew the troops from Florida, 
South Carolina, and Louisiana, and the reconstructed 
Governments of those States surrendered without a 
struggle. All the Southern States were now Democratic ; 
the negroes had every right but that of voting ; and even 
this was permitted to a sufficient extent to throw a veil 
over the well-understood general state of affairs. Colo- 
rado, the thirty-eighth State (and the last up Admission of 
to 1887), was admitted in 1876 and took part Colorado. 
in this election. 

322. The Hayes administration was a welcome period 
of calm. The main subject of public interest was mone- 
tary, and much of it was due to the change of conditions 
during and since the war. In order to sell bonds during 
the war it had been necessary, not only to make the 
interest very high (in some cases seven and three-tenths 
per cent.), but to sell them for the Government's own 
depreciated paper. The Act of 1869, to restore the pub- 
lic credit, pledged the faith of the United States that 
the bonds should be paid in coin. This had seemed very 
inequitable to some, but was acquiesced in. When the 
price of silver had fallen, in July, 1876, to 94 Demonetization 
cents, a ratio for gold and silver of 20 : 1, and of silver, 
it was found that an Act of 1873 had dropped the silver 
dollar from the coinage, the people jumped to the conclu- 
sion that this was a trick of the bondholders to secure a 



262 THE UNITED STATES. 

further advantage in the payment of their bonds in the 
more valuable metal only. It was useless to urge that 
for forty years before 1873 the silver dollar had been 
token money, and that its average coinage had been 
only about $150,000 a year ; the current was too strong 
to be resisted, and Congress passed (1878) an Act to 
restore the silver dollar to the coinage, to compel the 
coinage of at least $2,000,000 in silver per month, and to 
make the silver dollar legal tender to any amount. The 
Act is still (1887) in force, in spite of the recommenda- 
tions of successive Presidents and Secretaries of the 
Treasury for its repeal. The operation of 
"^' refunding had been begun under the Act of 
July 14, 1870, authorizing the issue of five, four and a 
half, and four per cent, bonds, to take the place of those 
at higher interest which should be payable. This first 
refunding operation was completed in the year of the re- 
sumption of specie payments (1879). The issues were 
$500,000,000 at five per cent., $185,000,000 at four and 
one-half, and $710,345,950 at four, reducing the annual 
interest charge from $81,639,684 to $61,738,838. One 
secret of the success of the Government and its high 
credit was the persistence of the people in urging the 
payment of the national debt. The work was begun as 
soon as the war was ended ; before all the soldiers had 
Reduction of ^ccn scut liomc $30,000,000 of the debt had 
national debt. \)qqii paid, and hardly a month has passed 
since without some reduction of the total amount. 
Between 1865 and 1880 the debt fell from $2,850,000,000 
to about $2,000,000,000 ; and, as it decreased, the ability 
of the Government to borrow at lower interest increased. 
About $200,000,000 of six per cent, bonds fell due in 
1881, and the Secretary of the Treasury (Windom) took 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 263 

the responsibility of allowing the holders of them to 
exchange them for three and one-half per cent, bonds, 
redeemable at the pleasure of the Government. This 
privilege was extended to about $300,000,000 of other 
bonds, giving a saving of $10,000,000 interest. The four 
and one-half per cent, bonds of 1870-71 ($250,000,000) 
are not redeemable until 1891, and the four bonds 
($738,000,000) until 1907. Eoughly stated, the whole 
debt, deducting cash in the treasury, is under $1,400,- 
000,000, about $1,100,000,000 being interest bearing, the 
remainder non-interest bearing paper currency of differ- 
ent kinds. 

323. In 1880 the Eepublicans nominated Garfield and 
Arthur, and the Democrats Hancock and English. Again 
there was no great distinction between the 
party principles advocated. The Democrats, 
naturally a free-trade party, were not at all ready to fight 
a battle on that issue ; and the Republicans, turning the 
contest to the point on which their opponents were 
divided, succeeded in electing their candidates. They 
were inaugurated in 1881 ; and the scramble for office 
which had marked each new administration since 1829 
followed (§ 202). The power of the senate to confirm 
the President's nominations had brought about a practice 
by which the appointments m each State were left to 
the suggestion of the administration senators from that 
State. The senators from New York, feeling aggrieved 
at certain appointments in their State, and desiring the 
prestige of a re-election by their legislature, resigned. 
Unfortunately for them the legislature took them at 
their vford, and began to ballot for their successors. 
Their efforts to be re-elected, the caucuses and charges 
of treachery or corruption, and the newspaper comments 



264 THE UNITED STATES. 

made up a disgraceful scene. In the midst of it a dis- 
appointed applicant for office shot the President (July 2), 
Assassination of ^"^^ ^^ dlcd two mouths later. Vice-Presi- 
Garfieid. ^q^^ Arthur succeeded him (§ 117), and had 
an uneventful administration. The death of President 
Garfield called general attention to the abominations of 
the system under which each party, while in office, had 
paid its party expenses by the use of minor offices for 
Civil service its adhcrcuts. The President's power of ap- 
reform. poiutmcut could uot bc coutrollcd ; but the 
Pendleton Act (1883) permitted the President to make 
appointments to designated classes of offices on the rec- 
ommendation of a board of civil service commissioners. 
President Arthur executed the law faithfully, but its 
principle could hardly be considered established until it 
had been put through the test of a Democratic admin- 
istration ; and this consideration undoubtedly 
' had its influence on the next election (1884). 
The Eepublicans nominated Blaine and Logan, and the 
Democrats Cleveland and Hendricks. A small majority 
for the Democratic candidates in the State of New York 
gave them its electoral votes and decided the election in 
their favor. They were inaugurated (1885), and for the 
first time in more than fifty years no general change of 
office-holders took place. The Pendleton Act was 
obeyed ; and its principle was applied to very many of 
the offices not legally covered by it. There have been, 
however, very many survivals of the old system of 
appointment, and each of them has been met by a general 
popular disapproval which is the best proof of the change 
of public sentiment. At least, both parties are com- 
mitted to the principle of civil service reform. There is 
a growing desire to increase the number of offices to 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 265 

which it is to be applied ; and the principle is making its 
way into the administration of States and cities. 

324. At home and abroad there is not a cloud on the po- 
litical future of the United States. The economic condi- 
tions are not so flattering ; and there are indications that 
a new era of struggle is opening before the country, and 
that it must meet even greater difficulties in the imme- 
diate future. The seeds of these may perhaps be found 
in the way in which the institutions of the country have 
met the new economic conditions which came in with the 
railway in 1830. 

325. Corporations had existed in the United States 
before 1830, but the conditions, without the railway or 
telegraph, were not such as to give them pro- ^^^ orations 
nounced advantages over the individual. All in tiie united 
this was changed under the new regime ; the 
corporation soon began to show its superiority. In the 
United States at present there are many kinds of busi- 
ness in which, if the individual is not very highly 
endowed, it is better for him to take service with a cor- 
poration. Individual success is growing more rare ; and 
even the successful individual is usually succeeded by 
a corporation of some sort. In the United States, as 
in England, the new era came into a country which had 
always been decided in its leanings to individual free- 
dom; and the country could see no new departure in 
recognizing fully an individual freedom of incorporation 
(§ 215). Instead of the old system under Freedom of 
which each incorporation was a distinct legis- incorporation. 
lative act, general provisions were rapidly adopted by 
the several States, providing forms by which any group 
of persons could incorporate themselves for any purpose. 
The first Act of the kind was passed in Connecticut in 



266 THE UNITED STATES. 

1837, and the principle of the English Limited Liability 
Act of 1855 was taken directly from it. The change 
was first embodied in New York in its constitution of 
1846, as follows : " Corporations may be formed under 
general laws, but shall not be created by special Act, 
except for municipal purposes and in cases where, in the 
judgment of the legislature, the objects of the corpora- 
tion cannot be attained under general laws." The general 
laws were for a long time merely directions to the cor- 
porators as to the form of the certificate and the place 
where it Avas to be deposited. The New York provision 
was only a development of the principle of a statute of 
1811 applying to manufacturing, but it is an instance of 
what was taking place all over the country. 

326. The consequent freedom of corporations was also 
influenced by the law, as expounded by the Supreme 

" Dartmouth Court of the United States in the " Dartmouth 
College case." College casc " (1819), whose principle has al- 
ways been the object of vigorous but unsuccessful criti- 
cism. The States are prohibited by the Constitution 
from passing any laws which shall alter the obligation 
of contracts. This decision held that a charter was a 
contract between the State and the corporation created 
by it, and therefore unalterable except by consent of the 
corporation. The States were careful thereafter to in- 
sert in all charters a clause giving the State the right to 
alter the charter; but the decision has tended to give 
judges a bias in favor of the corporations in all fairly 
doubtful cases. Corporations in the United States thus 
grew luxuriantly, guarded by the Constitution, and very 
little trenched upon by the States. 

327. American corporations have usually been well 
managed, and very much of the extraordinary develop- 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 267 

ment of the wealth of the United States has been due 
to them. But a corporation which holds $400,000,000 of 
property, owns more than one State legisla- 

. T 1 , T T , 1 Corporate power. 

ture, and has a heavy lien on several others, 
is not an easy creature to control or limit. Wars of 
rates between rival corporations claiming great stretches 
of territory as ^^ their own," into which other corpora- 
tions must not intrude, are startling things to any peo- 
ple. The rise of a corporation, built upon the ruins 
of countless individual business concerns, and showing 
that it can reduce railway corporations to an obedience 
which they refuse to the State, is too suggestive of 
an imperium in imperio to be pleasant to a democracy. 
The States, to which the whole subject legiti- inter-state 
mately belongs, confess their inability to deal Co^^fT^erce Act. 
with it by leaving Congress to pass the Inter-State 
Commerce Act (1887), intended to stop the encroach- 
ments of railway corporations on individual rights 
(§ 106) ; but the success of even this measure is still 
quite doubtful. 

328. Still more unhappy have been some of the effects 
of the new regime on the relations between employers 
and employed. The substitution of a corpo- corporations as 
ration for an individual as an employer could employers. 
not but affect such relations unhappily, at least for a 
time ; but the freedom and power of the corporate 
employers strained the relations farther than was at all 
necessary. The first clumsy attempts to control the 
corporations, by limiting the percentage of their profits, 
led to the artifice of "watering," or unnecessarily in- 
creasing their stock. In good years the nominal divi- 
dends were thus kept down to an apparently normal 
percentage. When bad years, or increasing competition, 



268 THE UNITED STATES. 

began to cut down the dividends, the managers were 
often forced to attack the wages, or increase the duties, 
of their employees. The '' bad years '' began to be more 
numerous and constant after the financial crisis of 1873 
had set in ; and the first serious effects appeared in the 
" railroad strikes of 1877." 

329. For many years past, the drift of population had 
been towards an urban life. Taking the town of 8000 

Concentration inhabitants as the lower limit of urban popu- 
of population, latiou, wc find that 3.3 per cent, of the pop- 
ulation was to be classed as urban in 1790, and that the 
percentage had risen to 22.^ in 1880. If towns of 
4000 inhabitants had been taken as the lower limit, the 
urban population in 1880 would have been 13,000,000, or 
more than twenty-five per cent. It may be thought that 
the policy of protection, of abnormal stimulation of 
manufactures, had something to do with this tendency ; 
but it is noteworthy that the increase during the gener- 
ally free-trade period of 1840-60, from ^.5 to 16.1, was 
the greatest of any twenty years, unless we take the 
period 1850-70, half free-trade and half protective, when 
the percentage rose from 12.5 to 20.9. Whatever may 
have been the cause, the tendency is indubitable, and its 
effects in increasing the facility of organization among 
the employees of corporations, whose fields of operation 
are generally urban, are as easily to be seen. 

330. Some of the corporations were controlled by men 
who were believed, in some cases on the best of evidence, 

Po uiar *^ bave gained their control by the defects of 

feeling towards Amcrlcau corporatloH law, particularly by the 

corporations. ppjyQggg ^f ^j^g majority of stock-holders to 

use the whole stock almost at their discretion, even for 

the wrecking of the road and its repurchase on terms 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 269 

ruinous to the minority's interests. Disrespect for 
" property rights " thus acquired was apt to extend to 
other corporate property, acquired legitimately ; in the 
railroad strikes of 1877, there were cases in which 
citizens usually law-abiding watched with hardly con- 
cealed satisfaction the destruction of such property as 
belonged to corporations. Further, the neutral position 
of the United States had brought about the transfer 
of considerable English and other foreign capital to 
the United States to be invested, under corporate privi- 
leges, in cattle-ranges or other industries connected with 
western agriculture. The American managers of these 
corporations, feeling little responsibility to any power 
except their foreign employers, permitted themselves to 
take liberties with individual settlers and their rights 
which arrayed a large part of the agricultural population 
of the west against corporate property. Finally, the 
differential rates made in private, even secret, contracts, 
by railway corporations all over the country, had 
gathered up passions of all sorts against the corporate 
*' monopolies." The anchor of agricultural conservatism, 
usually a safe reliance in the United States, had ceased 
to be of service in this matter. An order, the " Patrons 
of Husbandry," said to number 1,500,000 "Patrons of 
members in 1874, had been formed with the Husbandry." 
avowed object of checking the common corporate enemy; 
and, though its prominence was short-lived, its influence 
remained. 

331. The growing power of corporations, and that at a 
time when the democracy had just shown its strength 
most forcibly and to its own satisfaction ; the Anti-economic 
evident tendency of the corporations, espe- '"f'^ences. 
cially in the protected industries and in transportation. 



270 THE UNITED STATES. 

to further combinations, such, as "pools" and "trusts"; 
the consequent partial disappearance of that competition 
which had seemed to be a restriction on the power of the 
corporations over the individual ; the power and disposi- 
tion of corporations to cut wages down whenever divi- 
dends made it necessary to do so ; the half-understood, but 
heartily dreaded, weapon known as the "black list," by 
which combinations of employers, especially of corpora- 
tions, drove employees inclined to "agitation" out of 
employment ; the general misgivings as to the wisdom 
or honesty of the State legislatures, in which the power 
over corporations was vested ; the unhappy influences of 
the increase of urban population over the jury system ; 
the complicated systems of appeals which had grown up in 
American law, with their opportunities for delay or per- 
version of justice by wealthy and determined corporations ; 
the altered character of American labor, which was now 
largely made up of a mass of immigration hardly yet 
fully digested, and more ai)t than American labor had 
once been to seek help in something else than individual 
effort, — all these influences made up a mass of explosives 
which became seriously dangerous after 1880. It was no 
longer so easy for the individual to defend himself against 
corporate aggression ; if it had been, the American work- 
ing man was no longer so apt to trust to an individual 
defence; and laborers began to turn to combinations 
against corporations, though these combinations were 
even more prompt and successful in attacking individual 
employers than in attacking corporations. 

332. The trade unions, which retained most of the con- 
servative influences of their generally benefi- 

Trade unions. . i i • i i i 

Clary nature, were not radical enougn ; and. a 
local Philadelphia society, the "Knights of Labor," was 



THE RECONSTRUCTED NATION. 271 



developed into a national organization, following the 
usual American system of local "assemblies," with del- 
egates to State and national conventions. .. Knights of 
With but 52,000 members in 1883, it claimed "-abor." 
630,000 in October, 1886, and 1,000,000 at the beginning 
of 1887. Its general object was the union of all classes 
and kinds of labor into one organization, so that, "an 
injury to one being the concern of all," the oppression of 
even the humblest and weakest individual might be 
answered by the sympathetic action of more important 
and, if necessary, of all classes of labor. The 
"boycott," an imported idea, was its most 
successful weapon; the firm or corporation which op- 
pressed its employees was to be brought to terms by a 
refusal of all members of the national organization to buy 
its productions, or to deal with any one who bought or 
sold them. Such a scheme was directly subversive of all 
social protection or security ; and yet it had gone on for 
nearly two years before it came plainly to public notice 
(January, 1886) . Boycotts increased in num- Anti-sociai 
ber; local assemblies, intoxicated by their results. 
sudden success, went beyond the control of the well- 
intentioned head of the order ; the passive obedience on 
the part of the members, which was a necessary feature 
of the system, evolved a class of local dictators, or "rings," 
which were irresponsible as well as tyrannical ; and the 
business of the country was very seriously threatened all 
through the years 1886 and 1887. 

333. Law has begun to pronounce distinctly against 
both the black list and the boycott, as well as against the 
systems based upon them. There can be no doubt of the 
cruel tyranny which the new system of labor organiza- 
tion tends to erect not only over its enemies, the class of 



272 THE UNITED STATES. 



employers and those working men who are not of the 
order, but over its own members. But the demonstra- 
tion of the illegality and tyranny does not alter the con- 
ditions of the problem, of which it is but a single phase. 
How are the English common law, its statutory develop- 
ment, and its jury system, to exist, when a great mass of 
the population is discontented, distrustful, and under the 
dominion of a secret public opinion, and when the way 
does not seem to be open for a removal of their discon- 
tents except by the serious curtailment of the corporate 
system which has been so powerful an agent in American 
development and wealth ? The great American republic, 
then, seems to be entering upon a new era, in 
which it must meet and solve a new problem 
— the reconciliation of democracy with the modern con- 
ditions of production. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 273 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



The works treating of tlie various phases of the history 
of the United States are so numerous that only the 
names of the leading authorities can be given: The 
histories of the United States by Bancroft (to 1783), 
Pitkin (to 1797), Kamsay (to 1814), Hildreth (to 1820), 
Bradford (to 1840), Tucker (to 1840), Spencer (to 1857), 
Bryant and Gay, Schouler, Von Hoist, Higginson; 
M'Master, History of the American People ; Gilman, His- 
tory of the American People ; Winsor, Narrative and Crit- 
ical History; Williams, Statesman's Manual; H. H. 
Bancroft, History of the Pacific Coast; The American 
Commonwealth Series ; Force, Tracts relating to the Colo- 
nies and American Archives; Poore, Federal and State 
Constitutions ; Hazard, Historical Collections ; JSTeill, Eng- 
lish Colonization in America; Dodge, English Colonies in 
America; Doyle, English Colonies in America; Burke, 
English Settlements in America; Holmes, Annals of 
America; Graham, History of the United States; Marshall, 
History of the Colonies; Palfrey, History of New England; 
Parkman's Works; Gordon, History of the Independence 
of the United States; Winsor, Reader's Handbook of the 
Revolution ; Carrington, Battles of the Revolution ; Lud- 
low, War of A77ierica7i Independence; Frothingham, i??'se 
of the Republic; Story, Commentaries ; Chalmers, Annals 
of the Colonies, and Revolt of the Colonies ; Scott, Consti- 



274 THE UNITED STATES. 

tutional Liberty in the Colonies; Journals of Congress, 
1774-89; Annals of Congress, 1789-1824; Register of 
Debates in Congress, 1824-37; Congressional Globe, 1833- 
72 ; Congressional Record, 1872-87 ; American State 
Papers (to 1815); Benton, Abridged Debates of Congress 
(to 1850) ; United States Statutes at Large; Revised 
Statutes of the United States; Niles, Weekly Register, 
1811-36 ; Tribuyie Almanac, 1838-87 ; Appleton, Anyiual 
Cyclopaedia, 1861-86; Spofford, Am.erican Almanac, 
1878-87; MTherson, Political Manuals; Greeley, Political 
Text-Book, 1860; Cluskey, Political Cyclopaedia, 1860; 
Hamilton, Republic of the United States; Eenton, Thirty 
Tears^ View; Young, American Statesman; Johnston, 
History of American Politics ; Stanwood, History of Pres- 
identicd Elections ; Porter, Constitutional History; Story, 
Commentaries on the Constitution; Kent, Commentaries 
on American Law ; Wharton, Commentaries; Duer, Con- 
stitutioncd Jurisprudence ; Brownson, American Republic; 
Mulford, The Nation; The Federalist; Jameson, Consti- 
tutioncd Convention; "Centz," Republic of Republics; 
Tucker, Blackstone^s Commentaries; Curtis, History of 
the Constitution ; Bancroft, History of the Constitution; 
Elliot, Debates ; Cooley, Constitutioncd Limitations, Taxa- 
tion, and Constitutional Law; Sedgwick, Statutory and 
Constitutional Law ; Bump, Notes of Constitutional Decis- 
ions ; Wilson, Congressional Government; Fiske, A7neri- 
can Political Ideas; M'Crary, Election Laws; Korer, Inter- 
State Law ; Lamphere, -4menca7i Government; Counting 
the Electoral Vote, 1787-1876 ; M'Knight, Electoral Sys- 
tem; Dillon, Municipal Corporations; Morse, Citizenship; 
Lalor, Political Cyclopmdia ; Burnet, Settlement of the 
North- West Territory, 1847; Flint, Geography and His- 
tory of the Mississippi Valley, 1828 ; Histories of the 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 275 



various States ; Bishop, History of American 3fanufac- 
tures; Seybert, Statistical Annals; Pitkin, Statistical 
View, 1816; De Bow, Industrial Record of the South and 
West, 1852 ; Eighty Years^ Progress of the United States, 
1861 ; First Century of the Mepuhlic, 1876 ; Compendium 
of the Census, for 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 ; Walker, 
Statistical Atlas, 1874 ; Scribner's Statistical Atlas, 1881 ; 
Reports of the Bureau of Statistics, 1866-87; Lyman, 
Diplomacy of the United States; Trescot, Diplomacy of 
the Revolution, and Diplomatic History, 1797-1801 ; 
Baker, Diplomatic History, 1861-65 ; Reports of the Secre- 
tary of the Treasury ; Cooper, History of the Navy (to 
1853); Emmons, History of the Navy (to 1853); Preble, 
History of the American Flag ; Kossevelt, Naval History 
of the War of 1812 ; Boynton, History of the Navy, 1861- 
Q>d; Porter, Navcd History of the Civil War; Williams, 
History of the Negro Race; Wilson, Rise and Fall of the 
Slave Power; Goodell, Slavery and Anti- Slavery ; Hurd, 
Law of Freedom and Bondage; Hammond and others. 
The Pro-Slavery Argument ; Stephens, War between the 
States; Blaine, Twenty Years in Congress; Official Rec- 
ords of the Civil War ; Rebellion Record; Personal Narra- 
tives of Grant, Sherman, McClellan, J. E. Johnston, 
Hood, and Beauregard ; Reports of the Committee on the 
Conduct of the War ; Scribner, Campaigns of the Civil 
War ; Battles and Leaders of the Civil War ; Comte de 
Paris, History of the Civil War in America; Greeley, 
American Conflict; Draper, History of the Civil War; 
Pollard, Lost Cause; Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confed- 
erate Government ; American State Papers on Finance 
(to 1828); Bolles, Financial History of the United States; 
Sumner, History of American Currency ; Gouge, Paper 
Money in the United States; Spalding, Legal Tender 



276 THE UNITED STATES. 

Paper Money ; Knox, United States Notes ; H. C. Adams, 
Fablic Debts; Gibbons, Public Debt of the United States; 
Reports of the Secretary of tJie Treasury; Wells, Internal 
Revenue Commission Report, 1866 ; Taussig, Protection to 
Young Industries, and History of the Present Tariff, 
1860-83 ; Young, Tariff Legislation of the United States, 
1S70', Hsidle J, Railroad Transportation; Poor, Railroad 
Manual; Adams, Railroads: their Origin and Problems; 
Hudson, Railways and the Republic; Ely, Labor Move- 
ment in America; Reports of the Bureaus of Statistics of 
the various States. 



PRESIDENTS AND VICE-PRESIDENTS. 



277 



THE PKESIDENTS AND VICE-PRESIDENTS OF THE 
UNITED STATES. 



Terms. 


Pkesidents. 


Vice-Presidents. 


1789-93 


1 


George "Washington, Va. 


1 


John Adams, Mass. 


1793-97 




George Washington, 




John Adams, 


1797-1801 


2 


John Adams, Mass. 


2 


Thomas Jefferson, Va, 


1801-05 


3 


Thomas Jefferson, Va. 


3. 


Aaron Burr, N,Y, 


1805-09 




Thomas Jefferson. 


4. 


George Clinton, N.Y. 


1809-13 


4 


James Madison, Va. 




George Clinton (rf. 1812). 


1813-17 




James Madison. 


5. 


Elbridge Gerry, Mass. (rf,1814). 


1817-21 


5 


James Monroe, Va. 


6. 


Daniel D. Tompkins, N.Y. 


1821-25 




James Monroe. 




Daniel D. Tompkins. 


1825-29 


6. 


John Quincy A dams, Mass. 


7. 


John Caldwell Calhoun, S.C. 


1829-33 


7. 


Andrew Jackson, Tenn. 




John C, Calhoun (res. 1832). 


1833-37 




Andrew Jackson. 


8. 


Martin Van Buren, N.Y, 


1837-41 


8. 


Martin Van Buren, N.Y. 


9. 


Richard Mentor Johnson, Ky. 


1841-45 


9. 

10. 


William Henry Harrison, 

0. (rf. 1841). 
John Tyler. 


10. 


John Tyler, Va. 


1845-49 


11. 


James Knox Polk, Tenn. 


11. 


George Mifflin Dallas, Pa. 


1849-53 


12. 
13. 


Zachary Taylor, La. {d. 

1850). 
Millard Fillmore. 


12. 


Millard Fillmore, N.Y. 


1853-57 


14. 


Franklin Pierce, N.H. 


13. 


William Rufus King, Ala. 
(f?. 1853), 


1857-61 


15. 


James Buchanan, Pa. 


14. 


John Cabell Breckinridge, Ky. 


1861-65 


16. 


Abraham Lincoln, 111. 


15. 


Hannibal Hamlin, Me. 


1865-69 


17. 


Abraham Lincoln {d. 1865). 
Andrew Johnson. 


16. 


Andrew Johnson, Tenn. 


1869-73 


18. 


Ulysses Simpson Grant, 111. 


17. 


Schuyler Colfax, Ind. 


1873-77 




Ulysses S. Grant. 


18. 


Henry Wilson, Mass. {d. 1875). 


1877-81 


19. 


Rutherford Birchard Hayes, 

0. 
James Abram Garfield, 0. 


19. 


William Almon Wheeler, N.Y. 


1881-85 


20. 


20, 


Chester Allan Arthur, N.Y. 






(fZ. 1881). 








21. 


Chester Allan Arthur. 






1885-89 


22. 


Grover Cleveland, N.Y. 


21. 


Thomas Andrews Hendricks, 
Ind. (fZ. 1885). 


1889- 


23. 


Benjamin Harrison, lud. 


22. 


Levi Parsons Morton, N.Y. 



INDEX. 



Abolition, 113, 162, 180, 191. 

Acadia, 25. 

Adams, Pres. John, 46, 60, 66, 76, 

112, 228-233, 277. 
Adams, Pres. John Quincy, 152, 

159-160. 
Agricultural machinery, 188, 224. 
Alabama, 154. 
" Alabama," the, 231, 250. 
Alaska, 249. 
Albany, 240. 
Alien laws, 130. 
Alleghany Mountains, 23. 
Allen, Ethan, 55. 
American party, 198. 
"American system," 155, 169. 
Andre', John, 72. 
Andrew, J. A., 211. 
Annapolis, 90, 187. 
Antietam, battle of, 229. 
Antifederalists, 111. 
"Anti-Nebraska," 198. 
Arizona, 184. 
Arkansas, 173. 
Arnold, Benedict, 61, 72, 74. 
Arthur, Pres. Chester A., 263, 277. 
Articles of Association, 51. 
Articles of Confederation, 79. 
Asiento, the, 26. 
Assembly, 9, 37-39, 46, 85. 
Atlanta, 238. 

Baltimore, 115, 148. 217. 

Bank of the United States, 124, 

152, 167. 
Bankruptcy, 100. 



Banks, 176, 225. 
Baptists, 12, 195. 
Barbary pirates, 141. 
Bell, John, 206. 
Bemis Heights, 71. 
Bennington, battle of, 70. 
Benton, T. H., 169. 
Berlin decree, 144. 
Billeting Act, 40. 
Black Hawk war, 188. 
Black list, the, 270. 
Blockade, the, 217, 235. 
Board of trade, British, 20, 34 
Bonds, 223, 261. 
Boone, Daniel, 47. 
Boston, 45, 53, 64, 115. 
Boston Port Act, 49. 
Boycott, the, 271. 
Braddock, Edward, 28. 
.Bragg, B., 231-233. 
Brandywine, battle of, 71. 
Breckinridge, J. C, 206-207, 216, 277. 
Brown, John, 205. 
Buchanan, Pres. James, 202, 277. 
Buckingham, W. A., 211. 
Bneua Vista, 183. 
Bull Run, battle of, 219, 229. 
Bunker Hill, 60. 
Burgoyne, John, 70. 
Burnside. A. E., 229. 
Burr, Aaron, 133, 141, 277. 

Cabinet, 101. 
Cabots, the, 1, 30. 
Calhoun, John C, 146, 159, 169-171, 
197, 277. 



280 



INDEX. 



California, 140, 186, 187. 

Camdeu, battle of, 73. 

Canada, 23-26, 28-30, 61, 146, 250. 

Canals, 135, 155. 

Carleton, Sir Guy, 52. 

Carolina, 5. 

Cass, Lewis, 169, 185. 

Caucus, 167. 

Cedar Creek, 238. 

Census, 95. 

Cliamplain, Lake, battle of, 149. 

Cbancellorsville, 233. 

Cbandler, Zachariah, 213. 

Charleston, 66, 73, 170. 

Charter governments, 8. 

Chase, Salmon P., 196. 

Chattanooga, 233. 

Chesapeake Bay, 75, 89. 

Chicago, 173. 

Chickamauga, 233. 

Chinese immigration, 250. 

Chippewa, battle of, 148. 

Cincinnati, 116, 147, 

Cincinnati, society of the, 77. 

Cities, 115, 134, 172, 268. 

Civil Rights Act, 259. 

Civil service, 166, 263. 

Civil War, 214-244. 

Clark, G. R., 76. 

Clay, Henry, 146, 156, 159-lGO, 196. 

Cleveland, Pres. Grover, 264, 277. 

Clinton, De Witt, 155. 

Clinton, Sir Henry, 71, 73, 75. 

Coal, 172, 251. 

Cold Harbor, 237. 

Colfax, Schuyler, 248, 277. 

Colleges, 17. 

Colonial rights, 35-45. 

Colonies, revolt of, 53-55. 

Colonization, 1-22. 

Colorado, 261. 

Columbia College, 17. 

Commerce, 17, 88, 98, 100, 115. 

Concord, battle of, 53. 

Confederate states, 208-216. 

Confederation, Articles of, 79. 

Congregational Church, 12. 



Congress, Continental, 38, 50, 55, 

0-1-66, 70, 77, 7i)-89. 
Congress, Stamp Act, 42. 
Congress of the United States, 92- 

111. 
Connecticut, 8-10, 90, 92. 
Conscription, 236. 
Constitution, 93-132, 121-126, 129, 

131, 134. 
Contracts, 100. 
Convention of 1787, 90. 
Conventions, party, state, 167, 208- 

209. 
Copper, 188. 
Copyright, 98. 
Cornwallis, Lord, 68, 73-75. 
Corporations, 176, 265, 267-270. 
Cotton, 115, 137, 153, 254. 
Counties, 10. 

Courts, Federal, 94, 104-106. 
Cowpens, battle of, 73. 
Crawford, Wm. H., 146, 152, 159. 
Credit Mobilier, 257. 
Cuba, 200. 
Currency, continental, 61; state, 

87; Federal, 220, 256. 

Dakota, 96, 253. 
Dane, Nathan, 84. 
Dartmouth College case, 266. 
Davis, Jefferson, 196, 209, 239, 241- 

243. 
Debt, public, 86, 107, 175, 235, 242, 

262. 
Decatur, Stephen, 149. 
Declaration of Independence, 26, 

38, 65, 120. 
Delaware, 7, 81. 
Democracy, 13, 120, 121, 139, 174, 

196, 213, 272. 
Democratic party, 127, 137, 167, 

198-199, 201-202, 204-207, 260, 

263-264. 
Departments, 100-101. 
Deposits, removal of, 176. 
Detroit, 24, 47, 147, 163. 
District of Columbia, 98, 186. 



INDEX. 



281 



Dorchester, Mass., 10. 

Douglas, Stephen A., 198, 205-20G, 

215. 
Dred Scott case, 86, 113, 203, 

248. 
Dutch settlements, 6. 
Duties, 99, 124, 155, 222. 

Education, IG. 
Edwards, Jonathan, 117. 
Election laws, 95, 259. 
Elective franchise, 121, 248. 
Electoral system, 94-96, 101-104, 

121. 
Ellsworth, Oliver, 90. 
Emancipation, 230. 
Embargo, the, 145. 
England, Church of, 12, 50, 195. 
Entails, 14. 

Erie, Lake, battle of, 149. 
Erie Canal, 155, 163. 
Eutaw Springs, 74. 
Excise, 98, 127, 256, 257. 
Exports, 19, 98, 115. 
Express companies, 172. 

Fair Oaks, battle of, 228. 
Farragut, D. G., 226, 240. 
Federal Government, 22, 79-113. 
Federal party. 111, 134, 151. 
Federal questions, 105-110. 
Filibustering, 200. 
Fillmore, Pres. Millard, 196, 202, 

203, 277. 
Fisheries, 77, 250. 
Five Forks, battle of, 241. 
Flag of United States, 63. 
Florida, 13, 29, 76, 182, 187, 188. 
Force Act, the, 259. 
Fort Du Quesne, 28, 29. 
Fort Hatteras, 219. 
Fort Necessity, 28. 
Fort Sumter, 212-215. 
France, 6, 23-34, 65, 69, 126-129, 

139, 144, 249. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 64, 65, 69, 76. 
Fredericksburg, 230. 



Freedmen's Bureau Act, 247. 
Free Soil party, 185. 
Free trade, 187, 263. 
Fremont, J, C, 202. 
French and Indian war, 28. 
Fugitive slave laws, 84, 106, 186, 
197. 

Gage, Thomas, 49, 53, 61, 63. 

Gaines's Mill, 229. 

Garfield, Pres. James A., 263, 277. 

Garrison, Wm. L., 180. 

" Gaspee," the, 49. 

Gates, Horatio, 60, 71. 

Genet, E. C, 127. 

Georgia, 5, 73. 

Germantown, 71. 

Gerry, Elbridge, 90, 277. 

Gettysburg, 234. 

Ghent, treaty of, 150. 

Gold, 185, 251. 

Gosnold, Bartholomew, 2. 

Governments, colonial, 7, 46. 

Grant, Pres. Ulysses S., 225, 231- 

233, 236-239, 241, 242, 248, 260, 

261, 277. 
Grasse, Comte de, 75. 
Great Britain, 33^6, 142-151, 157, 

252. 
Greeley, Horace, 260. 
Greenbacks, 220. 
Grenville, George, 39. 
Guadalupe Hidalgo, treaty of, 

184. 
Guilford, battle of, 74. 

Habeas corpus, 99, 218, 224, 260. 

Hamilton, A., 112, 124-126. 

Hamlin, H., 206, 277. 

Hancock, John, 44. 

Hancock, W. S., 263. 

Harrison, Pres. William H., 146, 

179, 277. 
Harrison, Pres. Benjamin, 277. 
Hartford convention, 150. 
Harvard College, 17. 
Hayes, Pres. R. B., 260-261, 277. 



282 



INDEX. 



Hayne, Robert Y., 1G9. 
Hendricks, T. A., 260, 2G4, 277. 
Henry, Patrick, 41. 
Hobkirk's Hill, 74. 
Holland, C-7, 72. 
Homestead system, 164. 
Hood, J. B., 239. 
Hooker, Josepb, 230. 
House of representatives, 95. 
Howe, Earl, 67-69. 
Howe, Viscount, 67. 
Howe, Sir William, 66-69. 
Hudson, Henry, 6. 
Hudson river, 155. 
Hudson's Bay Co., 182. 
Hull. William, 147. 

Illinois. 85, 115, 154. 

Immigration, 12, 121, 143, 165, 172, 

192, 250. 
Impeachment, 97, 101, 104. 
Imports, 21, 115. 
Impressment, 143, 151. 
Independence, 62, 75. 
Indiana, 85, 154. 
Indigo, 15, 19. 

Inter-State Commerce Act, 94, 267. 
Inventions, 171, 188. 
Iowa, 187. 
Ireland, 38, 250. 
Iron, 18, 153, 172, 254. 
Ironclad vessels, 227. 

Jackson, Pres. Andrew, 150, 158- 

161, 166-171, 175-179, 277. 
Jackson, T. J., 228-229. 234. 
Jamestown, 3. 
Japan, 199. 

Jay, John, 64, 76, 112, 128. 
Jay treaty, 128, 142. 
Jefferson, Pres. Thomas, 65-66, 

84, 114, 124-126, 127, 130-133, 

277. 
Johnson, Pres. Andrew, 240, 245- 

247. 
Johnson, Sir William, 28. 
Johnston, A. S., 226, 277. 



Johnston, Joseph E., 228, 232-233, 

241-242. 
Jones, Paul, 73. 
Judiciary, 94, 104, 194. 

Kansas, 197, 200, 211. 
Kansas-Nebraska Act, 197-199. 
Kentucky, 47, 127. 135. 
Kentucky resolutions, 131. 
King, Rufus. SO. 
Knights of Labor, 270. 
Know-nothing party, 198. 
Knox, Henry, 124. 
Kosciusko, Thaddeus, 69. 
Koszta case, 199. 
Ku Klux Klan, 258. 

Labor difficulties, 269-270. 

La Fayette, Marquis de, 69, 74. 

Land system, 163, 175. 

Lawrence, J., 149. 

Lee, Charles, 60, 64. 

Lee, Robert E., 228-230, 240-242. 

Legal tender, 100, 177. 

Legislatures. 9, 55, 79, 96, 97. 

Lewis and Clarke, 140. 

Lexington, battle of, 53. 

Liberal party. 182, 185. 

Liberal Republican party, 260. 

Lincoln, Pres. Abraham, 206,214- 

, 218, 225, 242, 277. 

Literature, 117, 156, 174. 

Livingston, Edward, 169. 

Locomotive engine, 171. 

London Company, '1-A. 

Long Island, battle of, 67. 

Lookout Mountain, 233. 

Louisburg, 20, 29. 

Louisiana, 30, 139. 141, 147, 150. 

Lundy's Lane, 148. 

McClellan, G. B., 219, 227-229, 

240. 
Macdonough, T.. 149. 
Madison. Pres. James, 90, 112, 146, 

277. 
Maine, 5, 154. 



INDEX. 



283 



Manassas, battle of, 219. 
Manufactures, 18-20, 115, 153-154, 

224, 251. 
Marcy, W. L., 169. 
Marion, Francis, 73. 
Maryland, 4, 8, 9, 81, 89, 112. 
Mason. George, 90. 
Massachusetts, 2, 4, 5, 8-11, 40-41, 

45, 48-55, 88. 
" MayfioAver," the, 4. 
Meade, G. G., 234. 
Message, president's, 100. 
Methodists, 195. 
Mexico, 141, 183-184. 
Michigan, 85, 173, 188. 
Milan decree, 144. 
Militia, 98. 
Mining, 18. 
Minnesota, 204. 
Missionary Kidge, 233. 
Mississippi, 154. 
Mississippi river, 23, 118, 140, 217, 

226, 232. 
Missouri, 154, 161, 200. 
Missouri compromise, 162, 203. 
Mobile, 23. 
Mobile Bay, 240. 
Monmouth, 72. 
Monroe, Pres. James, 154, 157-159, 

277. 
Montgomery, R., 61. 
Morgan, Daniel, 73. 
Morgan, E. D., 211. 
Mormons, 189. 
Morrill tariff, 211, 222. 
Morris, Robert, 87, 90. 
Morton, O. P., 211. 
Murfreesboro, 231. 

Nashville, battle of, 239. 
National banks, 225. 
National Republican party, 159. 
Naturalization, 98, 130, 143. 
Natural gas, 251. 
Navigation laws, 19, 39, 44. 
Navy, 64, 128, 142, 144-147, 148-151, 
214, 227, 256. 



Nebraska, 197, 200, 247, 253. 

Nevada, 240. 251. 

New Amsterdam, 6. 

New England, 4-32, QQ, 134, 145- 

146, 149, 153. 
New France, 23. 
New Hampshire, 5, 8, 91. 
New Jersey, 7, 8. 11, 68-69, 81, 91. 
New Mexico, 183-184. 
NcAV Orleans, 23, 25, 150, 227, 258. 
Newport, 69, 72. 
Newport, Christopher, 3. 
Newspapers, 175, 257. 
New York, 7, 8, 44. 82, 90, 118, 147, 

155, 
New York city, 7, 17, 66-67, 71-73, 

115, 155, 236. 
Non-importation agreement, 44. 
Non-intercourse law, 145. 
North Carolina, 8, 73, 92, 112, 

123. 
North West, the, 76, 85, 118, 215. 
Nova Scotia, 28. 

Ohio, 84, 115, 118, 147. 

Ohio Company, 27. 

Orders in Council, 144. 

Ordinance of 1787, 84, 114, 116. 

Ordinance of Secession, 95, 208. 

Oregon, 204. 

Oregon country, the, 140, 158, 182, 

184. 
Ostend manifesto, 200. 
Otis, James, 35. 

Paine, Thomas, 64, 89. 

Panic of 1837, 178; of 1873, 254, 

268. 
Parish, 9. 

Parliament, British, 19, 34r-53. 
Patents, C8, 136. 
Patrons of Husbandry, 269. 
Patroons, 11. 
Pendleton Act, 264. 
Peninsular campaign, 227. 
Penn, Wm., 7. 
Pennsylvania, 7, 12. 



284 



INDEX. 



Pennsylvania University, 17. 

Pensions, 243. 

Perry, 0. 11., 149. 

Personal liberty laws, 187. 

Petersburg, 237, 241. 

Petroleum, 251. 

Philadelphia, 71. 115. 

Pierce, Pres. Franklin, 195, 277. 

Pinckney, C, 90. 

Pinckney, C. C, 90. 

Pitt, Wm., 20, 28, 43. 

Pittsburgh, 27, 247. 

Pittsburg Landing, 226. 

Plymouth, Mass., 4. 

Plymouth Company, 2. 

Polk, Pres. James K., 277. 

Polygamy, 189. 

Pope, John, 229. 

Population, 204, 255. 

Port Hudson, 227, 232. 

Port Royal, N. S., 25. 

Port Royal, S. C, 219. 

Post-office, 136. 

Presbyterians, 195. 

President, 100-103. 

Presidents, list of, 277. 

Presque Isle, 27. 

Princeton, battle of, 68. 

Princeton College, 17. 

Proprietary governments, 8. 

Protection, 87, 123, 152, 170, 187, 

222. 
Public lands, 163. 
Pulaski, Count, 69, 73. 
Puritans, 4, 50, 
Putnam, Israel, 67. 

Quakers, 22. 
Quebec, 29, 61. 

Railways, 171, 188, 220, 252. 
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 1. 
Randolph, E., 90, 124. 
Rawdon, Lord, 74. 
Reconstruction, 245, 259. 
Refunding, 262. 
Representatives, 95. 



Republican party (of 1793), 126, 

130. 
Republican party (of 1856), 198, 

214, 245, 263. 
Repudiation, 58, 178. 
Requisitions, 86. 
Revenue, 222. 

Revolution, American, 9, 55, 74-76. 
Rhode Island, 5, 11, 90, 112, 123. 
Rice, 15. 

Richmond, 216, 237, 241. 
"Rings," 256. 
Roads, 116, 135. 
Rocky Mountains, 140. 
Roman Catholics, 195. 
Rosecraus, Wm. S., 231. 
Royal governments, 8. 
Russia, 158. 
Rutledge, John, 90. 

Saratoga, surrender at, 71. 

Savannah, 73, 240. 

Schools, 164, 174. 

Schuyler, Philip, 00. 

Scott, Winfield, 148, 183, 195, 219. 

Search, right of, 144, 151. 

Secession, 57, 95, 207-211. 

Sedition law, 130. 

Seminole war, 188. 

Senate, 96, 193. 

Seven days' battles, 229. 

Seven Pines, 228. 

Seward, Wm. H., 196, 210. 

Seymour, Horatio, 248. 

Sharpsburg, 229. 

Shenandoah valley, 228, 238. 

Sheridan, P. H., 238, 241. 

Sherman, Roger, 90. 

Sherman, W. T., 236, 238-242. 

Shipping, 17. 

Silver, 251, 261. 

Six Nations, 82. 

Slave representation, 93, 191. 

Slavery, 4, 84, 113, 137, 161, 184-187, 

189-i94, 203, 206, 220, 230, 245- 

249. 
Slave trade, 26, 93. 



INDEX. 



285 



" Sons of Liberty," 41. 

South America, 157. 

South Carolina, 8, 41, 73, 112, 170, 

207. 
Spain, 6, 29, 118, 139, 157. 
Specie circular, 177. 
Squatter sovereignty, 185. 
Stamp Act, 39-43. 
Stark, John, 70. 
Star routes, 257. 
States, 22, 57, 84, 87, 92, 93, 96, 100, 

121, 122. 
State sovereignty, 57, 79, 109, 130, 

133, 161, 216. 
Steam navigation, 116, 140, 163, 

172. 
Stephens, A. H., 196, 208. 
Steuben, Baron von, 69. 
Stony Point, 72. 
Sub-treasury law, 178, 179. 
Suffrage, right of, 121, 248. 
Sumner, Charles, 196. 
Sumter, Thomas, 73. 
Supreme Court, 95, 99, 104-106. 
Sweden, 6. 

Taney, R. B., 169. 
Taxation, British, 36-53. 
Taxation, United States, 58, 87, 98, 

222, 243. 
Taylor, Pres. Zachary, 183, 185- 

186. 
Tea-tax, 48. 
Tecumseh, 146. 
Telegraph, 172, 188, 252. 
Telephone, 252. 
Tennessee, 47, 127, 135. 
Tenure of Office Act, 247. 
Territories, 84-86, 96, 184-186. 
Texas, 181-183. 
Thames, battle of, 149. 
Theology, 117. 

Thomas, George H., 233, 239. 
Ticonderoga, 39, 55. 
Tilden, S. J., 260. 
Tippecanoe, 146. 
Titles, 14, 100. 



Tobacco, 15, 19. 
Towns, 10, 45. 
Townshend, Charles, 39, 43. 
Townships, 164. 
Trade unions, 270. 
Treason, 106, 242. 
Treaties, 100. 
"Trent" case, 219. 
Trenton, battle of, 68. 
Tyler, Pres. John, 179, 277. 

Union, plans of, 30; drift towards, 
41-46; accomplished, 55, 105-110, 
122, 141; attacked, 197; main- 
tained, 246-249. 

United States, date of political 
origin of, 59; of legal origin, Q>Q. 

Utah, 184, 189. 

Valley Forge, 71. 

Van Buren, Pres. Martin, 169, 177- 

180, 185. 
Vermont, 11, 127. 
Veto power, 57, 97. 
Vice-president, 100-104. 
Vicksburg, 227, 232. 
Virginia, 3, 8, 17, 41, 74, 81, 83, 

91. 
Virginia resolutions, 131. 

Walker, Robert J., 187. 

Ward, Artemas, 60. 

Washington, Pres. George, 27, 60- 

75, 77, 87, 90, 112-129, 277. 
Washington city, 134, 148. 
Wayne, Anthony, 72, 135. 
Wealth, national, 252. 
Webster, Daniel, 118, 169, 196. 
West, the, 135, 172. 
West Point, 72, 187. 
West Virginia, 225. 
Wheeler, W. A., 260, 277. 
Whig party, 134, 159, 167-168. 
Whiskey insurrection, 127. 
Whiskey ring, 256. 
AVhitetield, Rev. George, 13. 
Whitney, Eli, 137. 



286 



INDEX. 



Wilderness, battles of the, 237. 
William and Mary College, 17. 
Wilmington, 241. 
Wilmot proviso, 185. 
Wilson's Creek, 219. 
Wisconsin, 85, 187-188. 
Woodbury, Levi, 169. 



Wythe, George, 90. 

X.Y.Z. mission, 128. 

Yale College, 17. 
Yellow fever, 134. 
Yorktown, 75, 227. 



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